The Many-Coloured Land

CHAPTER ONE

The giant sequoia had endured for 10,000 years. Standing amidst a grove of lesser specimens high in the Vosges, it was hollowed by ancient wildfire and rot. In millennia past lightning had sheared its top, so that the Tree was only about 100 meters in height; the trunk nearest the ground spanned fully a fourth of that distance, giving the sequoia the appearance of a huge truncated pylon. That it lived at all was evidenced only by sparse branches writhing at the broken crown, their small needles seemingly incapable of photosynthesizing enough sugar to nourish such a monument.

The sequoia was host to a family of fire-backed eagles and several million carpenter ants. Since early in the afternoon it had also harbored a band of freeliving humans who were accustomed to use the great hollow trunk as a safe-house in times of particular danger.

A thin rain fell. In another hour it would be dark. A woman in a water-stained doeskin cloak stood beside one buttress of the great bole, her eyes shut, her fingertips pressed to her throat. After five minutes had passed, she opened her eyes and wiped some of the moisture from her forehead. Stooping, she pulled aside the fronds of a large fern and entered an inconspicuous opening, a nearly healed fissure that led into the interior of the Tree.

Someone helped her out of the sodden cloak. She nodded her thanks. All around the inner perimeter of the trunk small fires burned on low stone platforms, their smoke plumes plaiting together with that of a larger central blaze and rising toward the natural chimney high above. The main fire was laid on a great X-shaped hearth. Its flames towered at the center and diminished to a comfortable cooking height at the ends of the arms. People were gathered around the central fire in great numbers; smaller groups huddled near the subsidiary fireplaces. The place smelt of steaming clothing spread before the flames, of baking ash-bread and pots of hot spiced wine, and of simmering meat stew.

Richard hovered over the stew kettle, snarling at the cooks and occasionally adding dried herbs from a collection of crocks at his feet. Claude and Felice sat together nearby, and Amerie was using her good arm to lay out medical supplies on a clean blanket. The nun’s tiny wildcat watched with keen interest, having learned quickly that the drug doses, dressings, and instruments were not playthings or prey.

Angélique Guderian came to this side of the fire and extended her hands to the warmth. She said to Amerie, “It’s a good thing, ma Soeur, that Fitharn and the other Firvulag were able to retrieve your pack. We are always short of medical supplies, and we will have great need of your secular skills as well as your spiritual ones. There are no professional healers among us, since all such persons are subjected to the bondage of the gray torc as soon as their expertise is discovered. We can only presume that your own torcless state is the result of a Tanu error.”

“And there’s no escape for the gray-torcs, once they’re collared?”

“They may escape, certainly. But should a wearer of either the gray or silver torc come within the sphere of influence of a coercive Tanu, the human will be compelled to serve the exotic, even to giving up his life. This is why there can be no torc wearers among us.”

“Except yourself,” said Felice softly. “But those who wear gold are free, aren’t they?”

Claude was whittling a new rosary for Amerie, his vitredur knife gleaming like sapphire in the firelight. He asked, “Can’t the torcs be cut off?”

“Not while the person lives,” Madame replied. “We have tried, of course. It is not that the metal is so durable, but rather that the torc somehow becomes bonded to the life-force of the wearer. This bonding is accomplished after the torc has been worn for an hour or so. Once a person has adapted, to unfasten or sunder the device brings death in convulsions. The mortal agony is similar to that inflicted by certain perverted redactors among the Tanu.”

Felice leaned closer to the fire. She had finally taken off her armor after the thirty-six-hour forced march to the Tree, and the wet cloth of her green dress clung to her slight body. Her legs and upper arms, where they had not been protected by gauntlets and greaves, were a mass of scratches and deep bruises. News that the Tanu Hunt had invaded the Vosges sent Madame and her scouting party, together with the remnant of Group Green, fleeing toward the Tree refuge, where they had been met by other human renegades.

Felice tried hard to be casual. “So there is no way that you can remove your own torc, Madame?”

The old woman gazed at the girl athlete for a long moment. At last she said, “You must not allow yourself, to fall into temptation, my child. This golden torc remains a part of me until my death.”

Felice gave a light laugh. “There’s no need for you to be afraid of me. Just look into my mind and see.”

“I cannot read your mind, Felice. You know that. I am no redactor, and your strong latencies shield you. But many years at the auberge gave me an insight into the personalities of others such as yourself. And limited though my own meta-functions may be, I am in the confidence of the Firvulag… and they read you like a child’s primer.”

“So that’s it,” Felice remarked obscurely. “I felt something.”

“The Firvulag have watched you almost from the beginning,” the old woman said. “They always follow the caravans, the Little People, hoping for some contretemps that will put the travelers into their power. So they beheld you on the shore of the Lac de Bresse in your bid for freedom. They even aided you, did you realize that?, by adding images of confusion to the minds of the chalikos and the soldiers, so that you and your friends were able to triumph. Ah, the Firvulag were impressed by you, Felice! They saw your potential. But they also feared you, and quite rightly. And so Fitharn, wisest among those who were following, caused a vivid illusion to seize the mind of one of your confreres…”

“Dougal!” Felice cried, springing to her feet.

“C’est-ça.” Richard gave an ironic cackle. “Crafty spooks! I’ll bet they could get that golden torc back out of the lake if they wanted to.”

A chaotic mix of emotions played over the girl’s face. She began to speak, but Madame held up her hand.

“The Firvulag bestow their gifts only as they choose, not as we demand. You will have to be patient.”

Claude said, “So the Firvulag followed us all the way. Don’t tell me that they clouded the minds of our pursuers as well?”

“Certainly,” Madame Guderian replied. “Would not the boatful of gray-torc marines have seen some trace of your own wake? Would not the tracking soldiers have found you in the forest, in spite of your pathetic attempts to throw them off the scent? But of course the Firvulag helped! And Fitharn also notified us of your presence in our Vosges forest, and so we came for you. His people also warned us of the Hunt, which does not usually penetrate deeply into the mountains.”

Richard tasted the stew again and grimaced. “Now that we’re here in a safe place, what happens? I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend the rest of my life hiding out.”

“We do not enjoy it, either. You have caused us a good deal of trouble by escaping into the Vosges. Ordinarily, the Tanu are inclined to let us be, and our free people reside in small homesteads or in secret villages. I myself live in Hidden Springs, which is near the future site of Plombières-les-Bains. But now Lord Velteyn of Finiah is wild over the killing of Epone. You must understand that no Tanu has ever before been killed by a mere bareneck human. Velteyn’s Flying Hunt will now search out even the most remote of our settlements, hoping to find Felice. There will be gray-torc patrols everywhere, at least until the Tanu become distracted by the preparations for the Grand Combat… As to what shall be done with you, we will discuss that when Peo and his warriors return. I have already perceived their approach.”

Claude rolled one of the large rosary beads toward the little cat. The animal patted it toward Amerie, then arched its back in appreciation of its own cleverness. The nun picked up the cat and stroked it as it tried to nestle into her sling. “Do you have any news of the other escapees? The people in the boats? Our friend Yosh? The Gypsies?”

“Two of the Gypsies survived their encounter at the ravine bridge. They will be guided here. There has been no word at all about the Japanese. The Firvulag in the northern regions are savage and not inclined to respect the alliance that their High King has formed with us. Your friend’s chance of survival is not good. As to those in the boats, most were recaptured by gray-torc marines from the lake forts. They are now imprisoned in Finiah. Six escapees who reached the Jura shore are presently in the care of friendly Firvulag and will be taken to a free-human refuge in the high mountains. Seven more,” Madame shook her head, “were taken by les Criards, the malign Firvulag known as Howlers.”

“What will happen to them?” Amerie asked.

Madame lifted her shoulders and the golden torc reflected the flames. “These exotics! Ah, ma Soeur, they are barbaric, even the best of them. And the worst! Who shall even speak of their enormities? Firvulag and Tanu are members of the same species. En vérité, they actually constitute a dimorphic race with a most peculiar genetic pattern. On their home planet, this led to an ancient antagonism between the two forms, the one tall and metapsychically latent, the other mostly short in stature and with limited operancy. You must understand that the exotics came to Earth in order to be free to pursue certain barbarous customs, holdovers from their archaic culture, that were justly proscribed by the civilized ones of their galactic confederation. Some of their cruel games are physical, the Hunt, the Grand Combat, of which you will learn more later. But others are jeux d’esprit, games of the mind. The Tanu, with their wide-ranging latent meta-functions, do not favor this subtle jousting so much. It is more commonly the province of the torcless Firvulag. The Little People possess some farsensing power, plus one highly developed operant metafunction, that of creativity. They are masters of illusion. But what illusions they make! They are capable of driving humans, even the weaker among the Tanu, insane with terror or anguish. Sensitive persons may even be killed outright from psychic shock. Firvulag can take the shape of monsters, devils, whirlwinds, conflagrations. They insinuate their delusions into more helpless minds and trigger suicide or self-mutilation. The latter is of great amusement to the worst of them, the so-called Howling Ones, since they are themselves deformed mutants. The weapons of the Firvulag are our own nightmares and fever-dreams, the fears and phantoms that assault one’s imagination in dark places. They take a sadistic delight in destroying.”

“But they haven’t destroyed you” Felice said. “They gave you a golden torc. Why?”

“Because they hope to use me, of course. I am to be a tool, a weapon, c’est-a-dire, against their most deadly foe: the Tanu, their brothers.”

Amerie said, “And now you hope to use us.”

Madame’s thin lips lifted in a small smile. “It is obvious, is it not, ma Soeur? You do not know how poor we are, what odds we have faced. The Tanu call us Lowlives… and we have assumed the name proudly. Over many years our people have managed to escape from captivity and were hardly thought to be worth pursuing. Most of us have no special talents that can be used against the exotics. But you in your Group are different. The Tanu would take revenge upon you, but we Lowlives see you as invaluable allies. You must join us! Felice, even without a torc, can control animals, even influence certain humans. She is physically strong and an experienced game-playing tactician. You, Amerie, are a doctor and a priest. My people have struggled for years without either. Richard is a navigator, a former commander of starships. For him there may be a key role in the liberation of humanity…”

“Now just a damn minute!” bellowed the pirate, waving his soup ladle.

Claude flipped bits of wood into the fire. “Don’t forget me. As an old fossil hunter, I can tell you exactly what Pliocene beast will be cracking your bones for the marrow after the Tanu and Firvulag get finished with you.”

“You are quick with a jest, Monsieur le Professeur,” said Madame tartly. “Perhaps the old fossil hunter will tell us his age?”

“A hundred and thirty-three.”

“Then you are two years my senior,” she retorted, “and I will expect you to render good advice to our company as a result of your vast experience. As I lay before you my grand design, the plan for the liberation of humanity, give us your invaluable counsel. Correct any youthful impulsiveness that I may show.”

“Gotcha, Claude,” Richard said, snickering, “Say… if anybody cares, this vat of slumgulion is as ready as it will ever be.”

“Then we will eat,” said Madame, “and shortly Peo and the fighters will join us.” She raised her voice. “Mes enfants! You will all come to supper!”

Slowly, all of the people from the smaller fires approached, carrying bowls and drinking vessels. The total number of Lowlives included perhaps two hundred, far more men than women, with a handful of children as quiet and alert as the adults. Most of the people were dressed in buckskin or homespun peasant garb. They did not seem to be outstanding physical specimens, nor were any of them decked out in the wildly eccentric fashion of certain timefarers in the Finiah caravan. The Lowlives did not look beaten or desperate or fanatical. In spite of the fact that they had just fled for their lives at Madame’s mental alarm, they did not seem afraid. They saluted the old woman gravely or cheerfully, and many of them had a smile or even a joke for Richard and the other cooks dishing out the hastily prepared fare. If one word could be used to describe the guerrilla contingent, it might be “ordinary.”

Amerie searched the faces of these free people, wondering what had inspired this relative handful to defy the exotics. Here were exiles whose dream had come alive again. Was it possible that this small nucleus could grow, even prevail?

“Good friends,” Madame was saying, “we have among us newcomers whom all of you have seen but few as yet have met. It is on their account that we have had to gather here. But we may hope, with their help, to reach our precious goal that much sooner.” She paused and looked about the company. There was no sound except the snap and sizzle of the firelogs. “As we eat, I will ask these new arrivals to tell us how they came from the prison of Castle Gateway to this free place.” Turning to the remnant of Group Green, she asked, “Who will be your speaker?”

“Who else?” Richard said, pointing the ladle at Claude.

The old man rose to his feet. He spoke for nearly a quarter of an hour without interruption until his narrative reached the point where Felice was about to initiate the attack upon Epone. Then there was a loud hiss. Amerie’s little cat sprang from her arms and struck a stiff pose, facing the door of the Tree like a miniature puma at bay.

“It is Peo,” said Madame.

Ten people, all heavily armed with bows and blades, came stamping and dripping into the shelter. They were led by a gigantic middle-aged man nearly as massive as Stein who wore the shell ornaments and fringed deerskin clothing of a Native American. Claude held off continuing his tale until these people were served with food and given a place close to the big fire. Then the paleontologist resumed and told the story to the end. He sat down and Madame handed him a cup of hot wine.

Nobody spoke until the gray-haired Native American said, “And it was iron, iron that killed the Lady Epone?”

“Nothing but,” Richard declared. “She was chewed to pieces and I let her have a couple of good ones with the bronze sword, but she still just about nailed me. Then something made me try Felice’s little dagger.”

The red man turned to the girl and demanded, “Give it to me.”

“And who the hell do you think you are?” she said coolly.

He roared with laughter and the sound of it boomed in the hollow trunk of the Tree as in an empty cathedral “I’m Peopeo Moxmox Burke, last chief of the Wallawalla tribe and former justice of the Washington State Supreme Court. I’m also the one-time leader of this gang of paskudnyaks and its present Sergeant at Arms and Warlord in Chief. Now may I please examine your dagger?”

He smiled at Felice and held out a great hand. She smacked the golden scabbard into it smartly. Burke drew out the leaf-shaped little blade and held it up in the firelight.

“Stainless steel alloy with an eversharp edge,” the girl said. “A common toy on Acadie, useful for picking teeth, cutting sandwiches, pricking out transponders from rustled cattle, and putting out the lights of casual assaulters.”

“It seems quite ordinary except for the gold of the hilt,” Burke said.

“Amerie has a theory about it,” Claude said. “Tell him, child.”

Burke listened thoughtfully as the nun set forth her hypothesis on the possible deadly effect of iron on torc-bearing exotics, then murmured, “It could be. The iron disrupting the life-force almost like a neural poison.”

“I wonder…” Felice began, staring at Madame with an innocent expression.

The old woman went to Chief Burke and took the knife from him. As the assembled crowd gasped, she held it to her own throat below the golden neck-ring and pricked the skin. A pearl-sized drop of dark blood appeared. She handed the dagger back to Burke.

“It seems,” Felice said gently, “that Madame is made of sterner stuff than the Tanu.”

“Sans doute,” was the old woman’s dry reply.

Burke mused over the small blade. “It’s incredible that we never thought to try iron against them. But vitredur and bronze weapons were so easily available. And we never tumbled to the reasons why they confiscated steel items back at the Castle… Khalid Khan!”

One of the crowd, a gaunt man with burning eyes, a scraggly beard, and an immaculate white turban, got to his feet. “I can smelt iron as readily as copper, Peo. All you have to do is furnish the ore. The religious prohibition that the Tanu put on ironwork among their human subjects simply led us to carry on with copper and bronze out of sheer inertia.”

“Who knows where iron ore might be found?” Madame asked of the company. There was silence until Claude said, “I might help you there. We old fossil hunters know a little geology, too. About a hundred kloms northwest of here, down the Moselle River, should be an accessible deposit. Even primitive men worked it. It’ll be near the site of the future city of Nancy.”

Khalid Khan said, “We’d have to do the refining work up there. Arrowheads would be best to begin with. Some lance tips. A few smaller blades.”

“There’s another experiment you might try,” Amerie said, “once you have a strong iron chisel.”

“What’s that, Sister?” asked the turbaned metalsmith.

“Try removing gray torcs with it.”

“By damn!” exclaimed Peopeo Moxmox Burke.

“Iron might short out the linkage between the brains of the torc wearers and the slave-circuitry,” the nun went on. “We must find some way of freeing those people!”

One of Burke’s fighters, a hefty fellow puffing a meerschaum, said, “To be sure. But what about those who don’t wish to be freed? Perhaps you don’t realize, Sister, that a good many humans are quite content in their filthy symbiosis with the exotics. The soldiers, especially. How many of them are sadistic misfits, delighting in the rules given them by the Tanu?”

Madame Guderian said, “It is true, what Uwe Guldenzopf says. And even among those of goodwill, even among the bare-necks, there are many who are happy in bondage. It is because of them that the expiation of my guilt cannot be a simple matter.”

“Now don’t start that again, Madame.” Burke was firm. “Your plan, as it stands, is a good one. With the addition of iron weapons, we can shtup it forward that much faster. By the time we’ve located the Ship’s Grave, we’ll have enough of an armory to give the scheme a reasonable chance of success.”

“I’m not going to wait weeks or months for you people to hatch your plot,” Felice declared. “If my dirk killed one Tanu, it can kill others.” She held out her hand to Burke. “Give it back.”

“They’d get you, Felice,” the Native American said. They’re expecting you. Do you think all of the Tanu are as weak as Epone? She was small fry, fairly powerful as coercers go, but her redact function wasn’t worth much or she’d have smelled you out back at the Castle, even without using the mind-assay machine. The leaders among the Tanu can detect people like you in the same way that they detect Firvulag. You’re going to have to keep out of the way until you get your golden torc.”

She exploded. “And when will that be, dammit?”

Madame said, “When we manage to obtain one for you. Or when the Firvulag choose to give you one.”

The girl replied with a volley of obscenities. Claude went up to her, took her by the shoulders, and sat her down on the soft wood-dust of the floor. “Now that’s enough of that.” Turning to Burke and Madame Guderian, he said, “Both of you have referred to a plan of action that you seem to expect us to participate in. Let’s hear it.”

Madame uttered a deep sigh. “Very well. First, you must know what we are up against. The Tanu seem to be invulnerable, immortal, but they are not. They can be killed by Firvulag brainstorms, the weaker ones, and even a powerful coercer-redactor may be over-whelmed if many Firvulag all project together or if one of their great heroes, such as Pallol or Sharn-Mes, chooses to fight.”

“What is this bad vibes thing?” Richard asked her. “Can you do it?”

She shook her head. “My latent abilities include the far-sensing function in moderation, a somewhat less powerful coercive ability, and an aspect of creativity that may spin certain illusions. I can coerce ordinary humans, and grays who are not under direct compulsion from a Tanu. I cannot coerce humans wearing gold or silver torcs, except with subliminal suggestions, which they may or may not follow. My farsense permits me to eavesdrop upon the so-called declamatory or command mode of the mental speech. I can hear the golds, silvers, and grays when they call out to one another over moderate distances, but I cannot detect more subtle narrow-focus communication unless it is directed at me. On rare occasions I have perceived messages coming from far away.”

“And can you farspeak back?” Claude asked in an excited tone.

“To whom would I speak?” the old woman inquired. “All around us are enemies!”

Amerie exclaimed. “Elizabeth!”

Claude explained. “One of our companions. An operant far-speaker. She was taken south to the capital.” He told what he knew of Elizabeth’s former life and her regained metafunctions. Madame frowned in preoccupation. “So it was she that I heard! But I did not know. And so I suspected a Tanu trick and withdrew at once from the touch.”

“Could you contact her?” Claude asked.

“The Tanu would hear me,” the old woman said, shaking her head. “I seldom project, except to sound the alarm to our people. Rarely to call to our Firvalug allies. I have not the skill to use the narrow focus that is undetectable except to the intended receptor.”

Felice broke in rudely, “The plan! Get on with it!”

Madame pursed her lips and lifted her chin. “Eh bien. Let us continue to speak of the potential vulnerability of the Tanu. They kill one another by decapitation during their ritual combats. In theory a human could accomplish this, too, if it were possible to get close enough. However, the Tanu with coercive or reductive functions defend themselves mentally, while the creators and the psychokinetics are capable of physical assault. The weaker among them remain within the protective sphere of their more powerful fellows or else have bodyguards of armed silver or grays. There are two other ways in which Tanu may meet death, both very rare. The Firvulag told me of a very young Tanu who died by fire. He panicked when burning lamp oil spilled upon him and in fleeing, fell off a wall. His human guardians were unable to reach him before he was incinerated. If they had rescued him before his brain burned, they could have restored him to health in the usual Tanu fashion.”

“Which is?” Amerie asked.

Chief Burke said, “They have a psychoactive substance that they call Skin. It looks like a thin plass membrane. Tanu healers with a certain combination of PK and redact are able to work through this stuff in some metapsychic way. They just wrap the patient up and start cogitating. They get results comparable to our best regeneration-tank therapy back in the Milieu, but with no hardware. Skin works on human beings, too, but it’s worthless without the Tanu operator.”

“Do the Firvulag use Skin?” asked the nun.

Burke shook his huge head. “Just old-fashioned frontier doctoring. But they’re tough little devils.”

Felice laughed. “So are we.”

“The last way that the exotics may die,” Madame resumed, “is by drowning. The Firvulag are excellent swimmers. However, most of the Tanu are rather more sensitive than humans to the injurious effects of immersion. Still, death by drowning is very rare among them and seems to take mostly certain careless sportsmen of Goriah in Brittany, who are accustomed to carry their Hunt to the sea. Sometimes they are swallowed or carried into the depths by the enraged leviathans that they prey upon.”

Felice grunted. “Well, there’s not much chance well be able to hold the bastards’ heads under water. So how do you plan to get the drop on ’em?”

“The plan is complex, involving several phases. It requires the co-operation of the Firvulag, with whom we have a very precarious alliance. Briefly, we would hope to attack and overrun Finiah aided by the forces of the Little People, who would be able to wreak havoc once they penetrated the city walls. Finiah is a strategic target of prime importance and it is isolated from the other Tanu population centers. Within its environs and protected by its defenses is the only barium mine in the Exile world. The element is extracted with great difficulty from a meager ore by rama workers. It is vital to the manufacture of torcs. All torcs. If we eliminate the supply of barium by destroying the mine, the entire socio-economy of the Tanu would be undercut.”

“Kinda long-range for a disaster, isn’t it?” Richard remarked. “I should think they’d have stockpiles of the stuff stashed away.”

“I have said that the matter is complex,” Madame responded in some irritation. “We will also have to find a way of stopping the flow of time-travelers. As you will see, it is the coming of humanity to the Pliocene that has enabled the Tanu to dominate the era. In the days before I began my meddling, there was a virtual balance of power between Tanu and Firvulag. This was destroyed by the human advent.”

“I get it,” said Richard, the old intriguer. “The Firvulag are willing to help you and your bunch in hopes of restoring the good old days. But what makes you think the little spooks won’t turn on us once they get what they want?”

“It is a matter still requiring some reflection,” said Madame in a low voice.

Richard gave a derisive snort.

“There’s more to the plan,” said Peopeo Moxmox Burke. “And don’t kick it in the head until you’ve heard the whole thing. Now down south in the capital…” The little cat growled.

All of them looked toward the entrance crevice. There stood a short, broad-shouldered figure in a dripping, mucky cloak. His high-crowned hat leaned lugubriously over one ear from an accumulation of moisture. He grinned at the company through a mask of mud in which eyes and teeth were the only bright points.

“Pegleg!” exclaimed Burke. “For God’s sake, bubi, what have you been up to?”

“Had to go to ground. Bear-dogs on my trail!” As he came stumping toward the fire, Madame whispered, “Not a word of the iron.”

The new arrival was something under a meter and a half in height, with a barrel chest and a visage that was rosy-cheeked and long-nosed, once the filth had been wiped away. He had lost one leg below the knee, but walked about agilely enough with the aid of a singular prosthesis fashioned of wood. Seating himself by the fire, he swabbed at the peg with a damp rag, revealing carvings of snakes and weasels and other creatures twining about the artificial limb. They had inset jewels for eyes “What news?” Burke inquired.

“Oh, they’re out there, all right,” Pegleg replied. Somebody passed food and drink, which the little man attacked with gusto, simultaneously talking with his mouth full “Some of the lads drew off a large patrol coming up the Onion River. Finished a good half dozen and sent the rest off with their tails between their legs screeching for Daddy Velteyn. No sign of the Exalted Cocksman himself yet, Té be thanked. Probably doesn’t want to get his lovely glass armor all wet in the rain. I had a bad moment when some bear-dogs from the squad that we finished began tracking me unawares. Could’ve nailed me, the sneaky turdlings, but I happened on a nice stinking bog and hid in it until they tired of waiting.” The little man held out his mug to the nun for a refill of wine. Amerie’s cat had not returned to her, even though she snapped her ringers in a way that usually brought the animal running. Two baleful glowing eyes watched Pegleg from a dark pile of baggage far from the central fire. The cat continued to utter high-pitched, quavering growls.

“We must introduce our new companions to you,” Madame said graciously. “You have seen them, of course. The Reverend Sister Amerie, Professor Claude, Captain Richard… and Felice.”

“May the Good Goddess smile on you,” the little man said. “I’m Fitharn. But you can call me Pegleg.”

Richard goggled. “Christ! You’re a Firvulag?”

The one-legged man laughed and climbed to his feet. There beside the fire stood a tall, dead-black apparition with coiling tentacles for arms, slitted red eyes, and a mouth full of shark’s teeth that slavered foul saliva.

Amerie’s little cat let out a spitting screech. The monster vanished and Pegleg resumed his seat by the fire, nonchalantly drinking his wine.

“Impressive,” said Felice. “Can you do others?”

The Firvulag’s eyes twinkled. “We have our favorites, little one. The visions-of-the-eye are the least of it, you understand.”

“I do,” said Felice. “Since you had to flee the amphicyons, I conclude that they’re not affected by your powers.”

The exotic sighed. “A perverse species. We have to watch out for the hyaenids, too, but at least they can’t be tamed by the Foe.”

“I can control bear-dogs,” Felice said in soft persuasion. “If I had a golden torc, I could help win this war of yours. Why won’t you give me what you’ve already given Madame Guderian?”

“Earn it,” said the Firvulag, licking his lips.

Felice clenched her fists. She forced a smile. “You’re afraid. But I wouldn’t use my metafunctions against any of you. I swear it!”

“Prove it.”

“Damn you!” She started toward the little man, her doll-like face twisted with rage. “How? How?”

Madame intervened, “Felice, compose yourself. Be seated.”

Fitharn stretched out his peg and groaned. “More wood for the fire! I’m chilled to the bone and my leg-long-gone torments me with phantom pain.”

Amerie said, “I have a medication… if you’re certain that your protoplasm is near-humanoid.”

He gave her a broad grin and nodded, extending the stump. As she applied a minidoser he cried, “Ah, better, better! Té’s blessing, if you can use such a thing, Sister.”

“Masculine, feminine, only aspects of the One. Our races are closer than you think, Fitharn of the Firvulag.”

“Perhaps.” The little man stared morosely into his winecup.

Madame said, “When you arrived, Fitharn, I was explaining to the newcomers my plan. Perhaps you will be good enough to assist me. Tell them, if you will, the story of the Ship’s Grave.”

Once again, the exotic’s cup was filled with wine. “Very well. Come close and listen. This is Brede’s Tale, which was told to me by my own grandfather, gone these five hundred years to Te’s dark womb until the great rebirth, when Te and Tana shall be sisters no more, but One, and Firvulag and Tanu cease at last their contention in the truce that shall have no end…”

He was silent for a long while, holding the cup to his lips and closing his eyes against the hot wine’s rich fumes. Finally he set the vessel beside him, folded his hands in his lap, and told the tale in an oddly cadenced singsong:

“When Brede’s Ship, through Té’s compassion, brought us here, its mighty striving drained its heart and strength and mind, and so it died that we might live. When we left the Ship our flyers spread their curving wings, and people sang the Song together, friend with foe. We made our weeping way to where the Grave would be. We saw the Ship come burning from the east. We saw it coming through the high air and the low. It howled its agony. As the rising of a planet’s sun dismisses night, so did the flaming of our Ship transform the very day, and make the Earth-star dim.

“The passing of the Ship devoured the air. The forests and the eastern mountains fell and thunder rolled around the world. The waters steamed within the brackish eastern seas. No living thing survived along the westward-trending path of death, but we watched sorrowing until the end. The Ship cried out aloud, it burst, it yielded up its soul. Its falling made the planet moan. The air, the waters, planet-crust, and Ship had merged into a glowing holocaust of stormy wound. But we stayed there until the fire was quenched by rain and tears of Brede, and then we flew away.

“Then Pallol, Medor, Sharn, and Yeochee, Kuhsarn the Wise and Lady Klahnino, the Thagdal, Boanda, Mayvar, and Dionket, Lugonn the Shining One and Leyr the Brave, the best of Tanu and of Firvulag, went forth into the setting sun to find a living-place while still the Truce prevailed and none should fight. The Tanu chose Finiah on the riverside; but we, far wiser, took High Vrazel on the fogbound mountain crag. This being done, one task alone remained, to consecrate the Grave.

“In final flight the aircraft took to air. We rode within them to the place, and all embarked to stand upon a rim of land above a cup of liquid sky too wide to see across, while all around the land lay scorched and still. We watched a Great Ordeal, the first upon this world, with Sharn contending for the Firvulag and for the Tanu, bright Lugonn. With Sword and Spear they smote until their armor blazed and birds fell from the sky and heedless watchers lost their eyes. They battled for a month of hours and longer still, until the folk who watched screamed out as one, transfigured in the glory that redounded to the Ship and solemnized its death.

“At last, brave Sharn could bear no more. He fell with Sword in hand, steadfast until the end. The victory was won by bright Lugonn whose Spear had caused the crater’s lake to boil and liquefied the rocks and conjured sparkling dew that merged its tears with ours. And thus the votive offerings of Man and Blade were chosen for the consecration of the Grave. We marched away, the voices of our minds raised up in Song for one last time in honor of the Ship and also him who there was offered up to captain it upon its voyage to the healing dark. There, comforted within the Goddess’s womb, they wait the coming of the light…”

The Firvulag raised his cup and drained it. He stretched his arms with a pop and crackle of ligaments and sat staring at Felice with a whimsical expression.

Madame Guderian said, “Within this ancient tale are certain pieces of information that repay our study. You will have noted the reference to aircraft. These are clearly machines of some sophistication, since they were able to leave the moribund Ship prior to its entrance into Earth’s atmosphere. Given the advanced technology implied by the encapsulation of the passengers within the intergalactic organism, one can hardly assume the smaller craft to be simple reaction-engine fuelers. It is more likely that they were gravo-magnetically powered, like our own eggs and subluminal spaceships. And if so…”

Richard interrupted, wide-eyed. “They’d probably still be operational! And Pegleg said his people marched away from the Grave, so they must have left the aircraft there. Son of a bitch!”

“Where are they?” cried Felice. “Where’s this Grave?”

The little Firvulag said, “When a person dies among us, the remains are taken by the family or friends to a secret place, one that none of the mourners has ever seen before. After the interment ceremony, the grave is never visited again. Its very location is blotted from the mind lest the remains be disturbed by the Foe or by irreverent rascals who would steal the funerary offerings.”

“Quaint customs,” Richard said.

Felice wailed, “Then you don’t know where the Ship’s Grave is?”

“It’s been a thousand years,” the little man replied.

Richard flung the ladle into the stewpot with a dang. “But, dammit, it’s gotta be a whackin’ great crater! What’d he say? ‘A cup of liquid sky too wide to see across.’ And it lies east of Finiah.”

“We have been searching,” Madame said. “Ever since I first heard the tale three years ago and conceived the plan, we looked for the Ship’s Grave as best we could. But understand the terrain, Richard! The Black Forest lies beyond the Rhine to the east. In our day it was a minor range, a picturesque parkland full of hikers and carvers of cuckoo clocks. But now the Schwarzwald mountains are younger and higher. There are portions well above twenty-five hundred meters, rugged and dangerous to cross and a notorious haunt of les Criards, the Howling Ones.”

“And do you know who they are?” inquired the Firvulag, smirking at Richard. “They’re the people like me who don’t like people like you. The snotty ones who won’t let King Yeo-chee or anyone else tell ’em who their enemies are.”

Madame said, “We have, over the past years, done a precarious exploration of the middle portion of the Black Forest range, north of Finiah. Even with the help of friendly Firvulag such as our good friend Fitharn, the project has been fraught with peril. Ten of our people have been killed and three driven mad. Five more vanished without a trace.”

“And we lost some of our lads to the Hunt, too,” Pegleg added. “Guiding humans just isn’t healthy work.”

Madame went on, “Forty or fifty kilometers east of the Black Forest begins the Swabian Alb, a part of the Jura. It is said to be full of caves inhabited by monstrous hyenas. Not even the malign Firvulag care to dwell in this territory, although it is rumored that a handful of grotesque mutants eke out a pathetic livelihood in sheltered valleys. Yet it is in this inhospitable country that the Ship’s Grave is most likely to be found. And with it, not only workable flying machines but perhaps other andent treasures as well.”

“Would there be weapons in the aircraft?” Felice asked.

“Only one,” said the Firvulag Fitharn, staring into the fire. “The Spear. But it would be enough, if you could get your hands on it.”

Scowling, Richard said, “But I thought the Spear belonged to the guy named Lugonn, and he was the winner of the fight!”

“The winner received the privilege of sacrificing himself,” Madame explained. “Lugonn, Shining Hero of the Tanu, raised the visor of his golden glass helmet and accepted the thrust of his own Spear through his eyes. His body was left at the crater, together with the weapon.”

“But what the hell good would this Spear do us?” Richard asked.

Fitharn spoke softly. “It isn’t the kind of weapon you might think. Any more than the Sword of our late hero, Sharn the Atrocious, which the obscene Nodonn has had in his thieving clutches in Goriah for forty years, is any kind of ordinary sword.”

“They are both photoaic weapons,” Madame said. “The only two that the exotics brought from their home galaxy. They were to be used only by the great heroes, to defend the Ship in case of pursuit or, later, in the most exalted forms of ritual fighting.”

“Nowadays,” said Chief Burke, “the Sword only serves as the trophy of the Grand Combat. Nodonn’s had it so long because the Tanu have won the contest for forty years running. Needless to say, there’s little chance we’d ever be able to get our hands on the Sword. But the Spear is another matter.”

“Christ!” Richard spat in disgust “So to make Madame’s plan work, all we have to do is mount a blind search over two-three thousand square kloms crawling with man-eating spooks and giant hyenas and find this antique zapper. Probably clutched in some Tanu skeleton’s hand.”

“And around his neck,” Felice said, “is a golden torc.”

“We will find the Ship’s Grave,” Madame stated. “We will search until we do.”

Old Claude hauled himself to his feet with some difficulty, limped over to the pile of dry wood, and picked up an armful. “I don’t think any more blind hunting will be necessary,” he said, tossing the sticks onto the blaze. A great cloud of sparks soared into the Tree’s black height.

Everybody stared at him.

Chief Burke asked, “Do you know where this crater might be?”

“I know where it has to be. Only one astrobleme in Europe fits the bill. The Ries.”

The stout fighter with the pipe smacked his own forehead and exclaimed, “Das Rieskessel bei Nordlingenl Naturlich! What a bunch of stupid pricks we’ve been! Hansi! Gert! We read about it in kindergarten!”

“Hell, yes,” sang out another man from the crowd. And a third Lowlife added, “But you gotta remember, Uwe, they told us kids a meteorite made the thing.”

“The Ship’s Grave!” one of the women cried out “It it’s not just a myth, then there’s a chance for us! We really might be able to free humanity from these bastards!” An exultant shout went up from the rest of the crowd.

“Be silent, for the love of God!” Madame implored them.

Her hand were clasped before her breast almost prayerfully as she addressed Claude. “You are certain? You are positive that this, this Ries must be the Ship’s Grave?”

The old paleontologist picked up a branch from the woodpile. Scuffing an area of dust flat, he drew a vertical row of X’s.

“There are the Vosges Mountains. We’re on the western flank, about here.” He poked, then slashed a line parallel to, and east of, the range. “Here’s the Rhine, flowing roughly south to north through a wide rift valley. Finiah is here on the eastern bank.” More X’s were drawn behind the Tanu city. “Here’s the Black Forest range, trending north-south just like the Vosges. Same basic geology. And beyond it, slanting off to the northeast, the Swabian Jura. This line I’m drawing under the Jura is the River Danube. It flows off east into the Pannonian Lagoon in Hungary, someplace over under the woodpile. And right about here…”

The entire company was on its feet, straining to see and holding its collective breath as the old man stabbed his branch down.

“…is the Ries astrobleme. A few kloms north of the Danube, at the site of the future city of Nördlingen, maybe three hundred kloms east of here. And sure as God made little green apples, that’s your Ship’s Grave. It’s a crater more than twenty-five kloms in diameter. The largest in Europe.”

There was an uproar among the Lowlife folk. People crowded in to congratulate Claude and get refills of wine. Someone got out a reed flute and began to play a sprightly tune. Others laughed and danced about. The day that had begun in panicked flight from exotic enemies showed signs of ending as a celebration.

Ignoring the merrymakers, Madame whispered to Chief Burke. She and the Native American beckoned to the remnant of Group Green and withdrew into a deeply shadowed part of the hollow sequoia.

“It may be possible,” Madame said, “just barely possible, to implement the plan yet this year. But we will have to set out at once. You must lead, Peo. And I must also go to detect and repel the Howling Ones. We will require your help to find the crater, Claude and that of Felice to coerce hostile animals same coin as that unjustly used. The loss of your starship, of your livelihood, was not enough and you know it! You must give of yourself, and then you will no longer despise yourself. Help us. Help your friends who need you.

“Damn…” He bunked away the mist that had risen in his eyes.

Save.

His words were barely audible. “All right.” The others were all looking at him, but he could not see their eyes. “I’ll go with you. I’ll fly the aircraft back here if I can. But that’s all I can promise.”

“It is enough,” Madame said.

Back at the central fire, the singing and laughing were more subdued. People drifted away to the smaller hearths to prepare for sleep. A small figure hobbled toward Madame, silhouetted against the dying bonfire.

“I’ve been thinking on your expedition to the Ship’s Grave,” said Fitharn. “You’re going to need the help of our people.”

“To find the Danube quickly,” Claude agreed. “Do you have any idea of the best way to reach it? In our time, its head-waters were in the Black Forest. God knows where the river begins nowadays. The Alps, even some super version of Lake Constance.”

“There is only one person with the authority to help you,” the Firvulag said. “You’re going to have to visit the King.”

CHAPTER TWO

Yeochee IV, High King of the Firvulag, came tiptoeing into the main audience hall of his mountain fortress, his seeker-sense probing the dim recesses of the great cavern. “Lulo, my little pomegranate! Where are you hiding?” There was a sound like the jingling of tiny bells mixed with laughter. A shadow fluttered among the red-and-cream stalactites, the hanging tapestries, the tatty fringed trophy banners from Grand Combats forty years gone. Leaving a musky scent in its wake, something glided like a huge moth into a cul-de-sac chamber at one side of the hall.

Yeochee rushed in pursuit “Now I’ve got you trapped! There’s no way out of the crystal grotto except past me!”

The alcove was lit by candles in a single golden sconce. The flames struck glints from an incredible profusion of quartz prisms that encrusted the walls, sparkling pink and purple and white like the interior of a giant geode. Heaps of dark fun made inviting mounds on the floor. One of these heaps quivered.

“So there you are!”

Yeochee bounded into the grotto and lifted the concealing rug with tantalizing slowness. A cobra with a body as thick as his arm reared up and hissed at him.

“Now, Lulo! Is that a way to welcome your King?”

The serpent shimmered and acquired a woman’s head. Her hair was varicolored like the snakeskin, her eyes a teasing amber. The tongue that stole from her smiling lips was forked.

With a cry of delight, the King threw open his arms. The snakewoman grew a neck, shoulders, soft arms with clever boneless fingers, a marvelously formed upper torso. “Stop right there for a moment,” Yeochee suggested, “and we’ll explore a few possibilities.” They fell onto the bed of furs with an elan that made the candle flames gutter.

A trumpet sounded far away.

“Oh, damn,” groaned the King. The concubine Lulo whimpered and uncoiled but her forked tongue continued to dart hopefully.

The trumpet. Waited again, nearer this time, and there was a booming of gongs that made the mountain vibrate in sympathy. The stalactites just outside the crystal grotto hummed like tuning forks.

Yeochee sat up, his once jolly face a mask of dismay. “That stupid contingent of Lowlives. The ones who think they’re onto a secret weapon against the Tanu, I promised Pallol I’d check ’em out.”

The alluring lamia wavered, melted, and became a plump little naked woman with apple cheeks and a blonde Dutch bob. Pouting, she pulled a mink rug over herself and said, “Well, this is going to take a while, for Té’s sake at least get me something to eat. All this chasing about has got me starving to death. No bat fritters, mind you! And none of that awful broiled salamander, either.”

Yeochee tied his slightly shabby cloth-of-gold dressing gown and ran his fingers, comb-fashion, through his tangled yellow hair and beard. “I’ll order you something lovely,” he promised. “We caught us a new human cook the other day who has a marvelous way with cheese-and-meat pastry.” The King smacked his lips. “This business won’t take long. Then we’ll have a picnic right here, and for dessert…”

The trumpet sounded a third time, just outside the hall.

“You’re on,” said Lulo, snuggling down under the mink. “Hurry back.”

King Yeochee stepped outside the grotto, took a deep breath, and transformed himself from one hundred sixty to two hundred sixty centimeters in height. The old robe became a great trailing cloak of garnet-colored velvet. He acquired a splendid suit of gold-chased obsidian parade armor, its open helm surmounted by a tall crown sprouting two curling members like golden ram’s horns and a beaklike extension jutting over the forehead that threw his upper face into deep shadow. He turned on his eyes so that they gleamed with sinister chatoyance. Making a run for it, he assumed the throne without a moment to spare.

The trumpet sounded for the last time.

Yeochee raised one mailed hand and several dozen illusory courtiers and men-at-arms winked into being about the throne dais. The rocks of the mountain hall began to glow with rich colors. Rippling music, as from a marimba of glass, filled the room as six Firvulag of the palace guard escorted the humans and Fitharn Pegleg into the royal presence.

One of the quasi courtiers stepped forward. Using Standard English for the sake of the Lowlives, he declaimed: “Let all pay homage to His Appalling Highness Yeochee IV, Sovereign Lord of the Heights and Depths, Monarch of the Infernal Infinite, Father of All Firvulag; and Undoubted Ruler of the Known World!”

An organlike peal of deafening intensity stopped the approaching visitors in their tracks. The King arose and seemed to grow taller and taller before their eyes until he loomed among the stalactites like some gigantic idol with emerald eyes.

Fitharn doffed his tallhat briefly. “How do, King.”

“You have our leave to approach!” boomed the apparition.

Fitharn stumped forward, the seven humans trailing after him. Yeochee noted with regret that only two of the Lowlives, a sharp-featured fellow with a big black mustache and a younger woman, hollow-cheeked and thin, with fair hair pulled into an unflattering knot, seemed genuinely impressed by his monstrous guise. The rest of the human party regarded His Appalling Highness with either scientific interest or amusement. Old Madame Guderian even betrayed a trace of Gallic ennui. Oh, what the hell. Why not relax?

“We shall condescend to assume a gentler aspect!” Yeochee decreed. He shrank down to his ordinary self, gold dressing gown, bare feet and all, with his coronet set askew as usual. “Now what’s all this?” he inquired of Fitharn.

“Madame Guderian’s plot against the Tanu seems to’ve taken a quantum leap, King. Better let her tell it.”

Yeochee sighed. Madame reminded him disconcertingly of his late grandmother, a lady who always knew when he had been up to childish mischief. Despite the old Frenchwoman’s talent for political intrigue, Yeochee had long since bitterly regretted giving her a golden torc. Madame’s schemes always seemed to end up benefiting the Lowlife humans, with only minimal gain to the Firvulag. He should have followed his first instinct and blasted her to flinders with his psychoenergies in those early days when she first had the temerity to step through her own time-gate. Indirectly, after all, she was the author of the present Firvulag degradation!

The old woman, dressed now in the dappled deerskin garments favored by forest prowlers of her race, stepped boldly to the throne and gave the King a perfunctory bob of her head.

“You’re looking well, Monseigneur. Plenty of healthy exercise, one trusts.”

Yeochee frowned. But at least the old trout had jogged his memory in regard to Lulo’s promised snack. He reached out and pulled a bellrope. “Pallol tells me you may have discovered the location of the Ship’s Grave.”

“It is true.” She gestured toward a silver-haired man among the humans. “One of our new compatriots. Professor Claude, believes he has identified the locale. It was known to him through his scientific studies in the world of the future.”

“Still known six million years from now?” The King beckoned to the paleontologist, who came closer. “You there, Claude. Tell me, in the future, did your people have any recollections of us?”

Claude smiled at the little exotic and let his gaze wander about the fantastic hall that lay within the heart of the Vosges’ highest mountain.

“Your Majesty, right this minute humanity’s direct ancestors are small apes cowering in the forest. They have no language, and so there is no way they can pass on to their descendants any memories whatsoever. Primitive human beings having the power of speech won’t evolve for another two or three million years or so, and they won’t develop oral traditions until, oh, say, eight or nine thousand years before my time. Wouldn’t you agree that it was highly unlikely for future humanity to have retained any recollections of a race of small shape-changing exotic people who live in underground dwellings?”

The King shrugged. “It was only a thought… So you know where the Ship’s Grave is, eh?”

Claude said, “I believe so. And you have no moral objections to our plundering it to our mutual benefit?”

Yeochee’s beady green eyes flashed dangerously. “Be careful, old Claude. You won’t be robbing the Ship of anything that can’t be returned in good time, with interest, when the unfair advantage that the despicable Foe has seized is equalized.”

Madame said, “We will help you to accomplish this end, Monseigneur. I have sworn it as part of my expiation! When humans can no longer be enslaved by the Tanu, the status quo between your two races will be restored. And our first strike will be against Finiah, using an aircraft and the Spear from the Ship’s Grave.”

The King twisted his beard into golden ropes. “The time factor! It’s only three weeks to the equinox, then another week and a half and we’re into the Truce for the Grand Combat in-gathering. H’mm. Our forces would need at least a week to prepare for an attack against the Tanu. Is there a chance that you can get back here with the flyer and the Spear before the Truce begins? We’d be willing to join you in an attack if there was a real hope of knocking off Velteyn and his flying circus. If we were successful against Finiah, the morale of our lads and lasses would be at zenith going into the Games this year.”

The old woman turned to Claude. “Is it possible for us to get to the Ries and back inside of a month?”

“We might barely manage it. But only if we obtain a guide who can take us by the shortest route to the head of small boat navigation on the Danube. This would be some place beyond the Black Forest in a kind of sediment-filled basin, the molassic foredeep between the Swabian Jura and the Alps. The river would likely flow as gentry through the molasse as the Sweet Afton. We could sail to the Ries easily and fly back.”

“Within the month?” the King persisted.

“If you use your good offices to get us a guide, it’s feasible.’’

Fitharn stepped forward. “The mighty Sharn-Mes suggested that one Sugoll might be made to assist the expedition. A bad-tempered joker, even for a Howler, and not any too loyal. But he claims to rule the Feldberg country, even the Water Caves beyond the Paradise Gorge. Sharn-Mes thought that if anyone knew of this river, Sugoll would. I can take these people to his lair if you’ll authorize Madame to impress his service.”

“Oh, very well,” grumbled the King. He crouched down and began groping under the throne, presently hauling out a small coffer that looked as if it was carved from black onyx. After fumbling with its golden catch, he flung it open, rummaged around, and came up with a Parker pen of twenty-second-century vintage and a much-creased, stained piece of vellum. Still kneeling on the floor he scrawled several emphatic ideographs and appended the royal signature.

“That should do it.” He replaced the writing materials and the chest and handed the missive to Madame. “It’s the best I can do. Freely translated, it says: Help these people or It’s your ass. You have our royal leave to coerce this Sugoll into slime-mold if he gives you a hard time.”

Madame gave a gracious nod and tucked the note away.

A bowlegged little fellow in a belted red smock came trotting into the audience hall and saluted the King. “You rang, Appalling One?”

“We hunger and thirst,” said the Monarch of the Infernal Infinite. He turned abruptly from the steward and shot a question at Madame. “You really think this expedition has a chance of success?”

“It does,” she affirmed solemnly. “Captain Richard, here, was a master of starships. He will be able to pilot one of the flyers spoken of in your legends, if they have not been destroyed by the elements. Martha and Stefanko possess technical knowledge that will enable us to make both the aircraft and the Spear operational. Chief Burke and Felice will defend us against natural perils en route. I myself will use my metafunctions to confound inimical members of your own race, as well as such Tanu that may venture to pursue us. Professor Claude will lead us to the crater once we are safely on the river. As to success…” She ventured a wintry smile. “That remains in the hands of le bon Dieu, n’est-ce pas?”

Yeochee glowered at her. “Why can’t you speak English like a regular human being? Don’t I have enough trouble with you? Oh, I admit the plan sounds good. But so did the scheme for tunneling under the Finiah wall and setting off that damned guano explosive your people cooked up. And at the last minute Velteyn let the Rhine into the diggings! A hundred and eighty-three Firvulag stalwarts swiming for their lives in a soup of bird shit!”

“This time it will be different, Monseigneur.”

Yeochee beckoned to the steward. “Bring me some of the best ale. And have that new human cook, Mariposa, the one with the nose, bake up one of those big flat open-face tarts with the melted chamois cheese and tomato sauce and the new sausage.”

The steward bowed low and ran off.

“We have your leave, then, to pursue the expedition immediately?” Madame asked.

“Oh, yes, yes.” The King’s growl was petulant. He drew his golden bathrobe around himself. “We command it, in fact. And now you are dismissed… Fitharn, you stay here. I’ve got something to talk over with you.”

The palace guards, who had stood immobile in their black-glass armor during the interview, now thumped short lances on the floor and prepared to escort the human visitors out. But the smallest female, the one with the cloud of pale hair , who was scarcely as tall as a Firvulag woman, had the boldness to call out.

“Your Majesty! One more word.”

“Oh, very well,” sighed the King. “I know who you are. I suppose you still think we ought to give you a golden torc.”

“Don’t make me wait!” Felice fixed him with a gaze even more penetrating than Madame’s. “With a golden torc I could insure that the expedition would be a success.”

The King vouchsafed what he hoped was a suave smile. “I know all about your extraordinary abilities. You’ll be rewarded with your heart’s desire in good time. But not yet! First, help your friends get the Spear and the flyer. If you should happen to find Lugonn’s torc there at the crater, take it! If not, we’ll see what can be done when you return. Deliver the goods and then we’ll talk about presents.”

He waved his hand in dismissal and the guards ushered the humans out.

“Are they gone?” Yeochee whispered, jumping down off the dais to peer into the gloom.

“Gone, King,” Fitharn confirmed. He sat on the edge of the regal platform, pulled off one boot, and tipped a pebble from it. “Ah, you little bastard!”

“Show some respect,” growled Yeochee.

“Speaking to the stone in my shoe, Appalling One… Well? What do you think?”

“Risky, risky.” The King paced up and down, hands clasped behind his back. “If only we could do without these damned middlemen! Pull off the whole thing ourselves!”

Fitharn said, “The despicable torc wearers must often entertain the same thoughts. They, too, are dangerously dependent upon humanity. But there is no other way for us, Appalling One. The humans are smarter than we are, stronger in other ways as well. Could we ever hope to operate a flyer after all this time? Or put the Spear into working order? We’ve had forty years to think of ways to bring down the Foe, and all we’ve done is cry in our beer. I don’t like the redoubtable Guderian any more than you do, King. But she’s a most formidable person. Like her or lump her, she can help us.”

“But we can’t trust humans!” howled Yeochee. “Did you feel that blast of hostility from Felice while she was saying ‘pretty please’? Give that one a golden torc,’ I’d sooner try to plug a lava dike with my royal swizzle stick!”

“We can control Felice. Pallol and Sharn-Mes have been giving the matter thought. Even if she finds a torc at the Ship’s Grave, she can’t learn to use it overnight. They’ll fly back here right away and Felice will be wild to get into the fight against Finiah. We’ll put her in the care of our Warrior Ogresses…”

“Te’s titties!” blasphemed the King.

“…and Ayfa or Skathe can put her down at the least hint of treachery. If Felice survives the assault on Finiah we can get rid of her by sending her south to the Combat. That will seem to fit right in with the second phase of Guderian’s famous plan. Don’t worry, King. We’ll use Felice and the rest of them to our advantage… and then Sharn and Pallol will engineer a suitably heroic demise for our noble human allies. If we play this right, the Firvulag can end up with both the Spear and the Sword, on top of the Tanu torcers and the Lowlives, too. And you can really mean it when you call yourself Undoubted Ruler of the Known World.”

Yeochee gave him an awful look. “Just wait until it’s your turn in the king barrel! We’ll see how well you…”

The steward came skipping out of the passage, carrying a large steaming tray and a glass flagon of tawny liquid. “It’s ready, Appalling One! Hot-hot-hot! And not with ordinary salamander sausage, either, but with a new kind! The cook Mariposa says it’ll frizzle your cojones!”

Yeochee bent over the tray to savor the fragrance of the wheel-shaped open pie. It was cut into wedges, each one oozing delectable layers of creamy white and red.

“Beggin’ your pardon, King,” Fitharn ventured, “but what the hell is that?”

The King took the platter and the bottle of ale and began to trudge happily toward the crystal grotto. “The special dish of one Señora Mariposa de Sanchez, late of Krelix Plantation, earlier of Chichen-Itza Pizza Parlor in Merida, Mexico… Leave us, Fitharn. Go with those damned Lowlives and watch ’em.”

“As you command, Appalling One.”

At last, the great cavern was quiet once more. Yeochee poked his head around the entrance to the geode chamber. The candles burned low and two fascinating eyes peered at him from the stack of dark furs.

“Yoo-hoo!” he caroled. “Goody time!”

Lulo came bouncing toward him in the most charming way.

“Grrum! Yumyumyum!”

He gave a delighted screech. “Let go! Let me put it down first, you mad succubus, you! Oh, you’re going to love this. It’s my newest favorite. Half cheese, half axolotl!”

CHAPTER THREE

“The unicorn! The unicorn! The unicorn!”

Martha keened the word unceasingly as she wept over the torn body of Stefanko lying in the middle of the marsh trail. Great cypresses reared up from pools of brown water on either side. Where the morning sunlight shone through the trees there were clouds of dancing midges and scarlet dragon-flies hawking among them. A lobster-sized crayfish, perhaps attracted by the blood dripping into the water, scrabbled slowly up the shallow embankment that raised the trail above the Rhine bottomland.

Peopeo Moxmox Burke sat propped against a mossy trunk, groaning as Claude and Madame Guderian cut away his deerskin shirt and one leg of his pants.

“The horn seems only to have grazed your ribs, mon petit peau-rouge. However, I will have to sew. Claude, administer a narcotic.”

“See to Steffi,” the Chief pleaded through clenched teeth.

Claude only shook his head. He took a herendorf bleb from the medical kit Amerie had prepared for them and applied the dose to Burke’s temple.

“Oh, God. That’s better. How is the leg? I could feel the bugger’s teeth press me to the bone.”

Claude said, “Your calf muscle is all slashed to hell. And you can bet those tusks were poison-filthy to boot. There’s no way we can patch this out here, Peo. Your only chance is professional care back with Amerie.”

Cursing softly, Burke rested his huge gray head against the cypress and let his eyes close. “My own fault. Stupid schmuck, I was concentrating on covering our scent by taking us through that patch of stinking pitcher plants. Watching for hoe-tusker sign, traces of bear-dogs… and we get ambushed by a goddam hog!”

“Silence, child,” Madame ordered. “You derange my stitching.”

“It was no ordinary porker,” Claude said. He wrapped the chiefs leg in porofilm after packing the wound with antibiotic floe. The decamole leg splint was already inflated and ready to be fastened in place. “I think the beast that did this job on you was none other than Kubanochoerus, the giant one-horned Caucasian boar. It was supposed to’ve been extinct by the Pliocene.”

“Huh! Tell that to Steffi, poor feygeleh.”

Madame said, “I will finish tending Peo, Claude. See to Martha.”

The paleontologist went over to the hysterical engineer, studied her swaying, wild-eyed actions for a moment, and saw what had to be done. He grasped her by one wrist and yanked her roughly to her feet “Will you shut up, girl? Your stupid bawling will bring the soldiers on us! Do you think Steffi would want that?”

Martha choked in outraged astonishment and drew back one arm to slap the old man’s face. “How do you know what Steffi would want? You didn’t know him! But I did, and he was gentle and good and he took care of me when my damn guts were, when I was sick. And now look at him. Look at him!” Her ravaged, once beautiful face crumpled in fresh sobs. Martha’s momentary fury at Claude dissolved and her arm fell. “Steffi, oh, Steffi,” she whispered, then fell against the sturdy old man. “One minute he was walking along and smiling over his shoulder at me, and the next…”

The gray monster had burst without warning from a thick stand of reeds and charged the middle of the line of hikers, tossing Stefanko into the air and then savaging him. It had switched its attack to Peo when the chief drew his machette and tried to stop the animal’s awful gobbling. Fitharn had burst into illusory flame, driving the boar off the natural causeway into the swamp shallows. Felice and Richard followed the fireball with drawn bows, leaving the others to help the wounded. But there was no helping Stefanko.

Claude held the shuddering Martha in his arms, then pulled out the tail of his bush shirt and used it to wipe her streaming eyes. He led her to the mossy hollow where Madame was working on Burke and made her sit down. The knees of the engineer’s buckskin trousers were stained with dark blood and muck, but there were also bright scarlet patches down around both ankles.

“You’d better have a look at her, Madame,” Claude said. “I’ll take care of Steffi.”

He got a Mylar blanket from his own pack and went to the body, fighting to control his own rage and revulsion. He had known Stefanko only four days; but the ready competence of the man and the warmth of his personality had made him a congenial trail-mate on the trek from High Vrazel to the Rhine bottomland. Now Claude could only do his best to smooth the contorted face back into its accustomed smooth lineaments. No need to look so surprised any more, Steffi boy. Just relax and rest. Rest in peace.

A horde of flies had descended upon the ripped mass of intestines and moved only with sluggish reluctance as Claude rolled Stefanko’s body onto the metallic sheet. Using the heat-beam of his powerpack, the old man welded the edges of the Mylar into a bag. The job was nearly finished when Fitharn, Richard, and Felice came squelching back out of the jungle.

Felice held up a ridged yellowish object like an ivory marlin-spike. “We got the fuckard for what good it does.”

Richard shook his head in awe. “A pig the size of a goddam ox! Musta weighed eight hundred kilos. Took five arrows to finish it off after Pegleg trapped it in a thicket. I still can’t figure how anything that big could have snuck up on us unawares.”

“They’re intelligent devils,” Fitharn growled. “It must have followed us downwind. If I’d had my wits about me I’d have sensed it. But I was thinking about how we’d have to hurry to cross the river before the morning mist lifted.”

“Well, we’re stuck here now that it’s broad daylight,” Felice said. She held up the trophy horn. “This fellow saw to that.”

“Now what?” Richard wanted to know.

Felice had undipped the arrows from the holder on her compound bow and she now knelt to dip the stained glassy heads in the water beside the trail. “We’ll have to hide out on this side until sundown and then cross. The moon’s nearly full tonight. We could probably get over the narrow strip of east-bank lowland in a couple of hours and then bivouac among the rocks at the foot of the Black Forest scarp for the rest of the night.”

The Firvulag gave an exclamation. “You’re not thinking of going on?”

She glared at him. “You’re not thinking of turning back?”

Claude said, “Steffi’s dead. Peo’s in a bad way. He’s going to have to be taken back to Amerie by one of us, or he’ll lose his leg, or worse.”

“That still leaves five of us,” Felice said. She frowned, tapping the boar horn against her buckskin-clad thigh. “Pegleg could go back with the Chief. He could get help from his people along the way. And before you leave,” she said to the little man, “tell us how to get to the stronghold of this guy Sugoll.”

“It won’t be easy.” The Firvulag wagged his head. “The Black Forest is a lot more rugged than the Vosges. Sugoll’s place is up on the northeastern slope of the Feldberg, where the Paradise River comes off the snowfields. Bad country.”

“The Tanu won’t be looking for us on the other side of the Rhine,” she said. “Once we’re across, we probably won’t have to worry about any more gray-torc patrols.”

“There are still Howlers,” Fitharn said. “And at night, the Hunt. Airborne, if Velteyn leads it. If the Hunt spots you in the open, you’re finished.”

“Can’t we travel mostly by day?” Richard suggested. “Madame Guderian’s metafunctions can warn us of hostile Firvulag.”

The old woman had come up to the group, an expression of deep concern upon her face. “I am not so worried about les Criards as about Sugoll himself. Without his help, we may never locate the Danube in time. But if Fitharn does not accompany us, Sugoll may feel that he can ignore the King’s directive with impunity. And there is another matter for grave concern… Martha. She has begun to hemorrhage from the shock. Among the Tanu, she was forced to give birth to four children in quick succession and her female organs…”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Felice impatiently. “If she rests, she’ll pull out of it. And we’ll take our chance with Sugoll.”

“Martha is greatly weakened,” the old woman persisted. “She will become worse before she is better. This has happened before. It would be best if she returns with Peo and Fitharn.”

Richard looked dubious. “But now that Stefanko’s gone, she’s the only technician we’ve got. Without her help, God knows how long it might take me to trace the circuits on that exotic aircraft. And if the zapper needs work, I wouldn’t have a prayer of fixing it.”

“The expedition could be postponed,” Fitharn said.

“That would mean waiting a whole year!” Felice blazed. “I won’t do it! I’ll go get the damn Spear all by myself!”

Back at the cypress, Martha cried out to them, “We can’t postpone the search, Madame. Anything could happen in a year. I’ll be all right in a day or two. If I get a little help, I know I can make it.”

“We could rig a litter from one of the cots,” Claude suggested.

Felice brightened. “And in the rough spots, I could carry her on my back. She’s right about anything being likely to happen if we delay.” Her eyes strayed to the Firvulag, who looked back at her with bland objectivity. “Others could find the Ship’s Grave ahead of us.”

“It would be wisest to turn back,” Fitharn said. “However, the decision will have to be that of Madame Guderian.”

“Dieu me secourait,” the old woman murmured. “One of us has already given his life.” She took a few slow steps toward the Mylar-wrapped bundle lying on the trail “If we could ask him his opinion, we know very well what he would say.”

She turned back to them, lifting her chin with the familiar gesture. “Alors… Fitharn, you will turn back with Peo. The rest of us will go on.”

They concealed themselves for the rest of the day in a dense taxodium grove hard by the western bank of the Rhine. The gnarled, low-growing branches made comfortable perches. Curtained by festoons of lichens and flowering epiphytes, they could safely observe the river traffic and at the same time be secure from the crocodiles, hoe-tuskers, and other potentially dangerous wildlife that infested the bottomland.

It became very hot as the sun climbed. Food was no problem, for there were plenty of turtles whose meat could be roasted with the power-beams, as well as palms with edible hearts and an abundance of honey-sweet grapes the size of golf balls that drove Richard into raptures of oenological speculation. But as morning dragged into afternoon, boredom and reaction from the dawn violence made the younger members of the party drowsy. Richard, Felice, and Martha striped off most of their clothing, tied themselves to upper limbs of the big tree, and slept, leaving Claude and Madame on branches below keeping watch over the broad river. Only a few supply barges from upstream plantations drifted past their hiding place. Finiah itself lay about twenty kilometers to the north on the opposite bank, where the short Paradise River tributary tumbled out of a deep gorge that almost bisected the Black Forest massif.

“Later,” Madame told Claude, “when it is dark, we will be able to see Finiah’s lights against the northern sky. It stands on a promontory jutting into the Rhine. It is not a large city, but it is the oldest of all the Tanu settlements and they have illuminated it with great splendor.”

“Why did they migrate southward, out of this area?” Claude asked. “From what I’ve been told, most of the Tanu cities are down around the Mediterranean, with this northern country left pretty much to the Firvulag.”

“A very warm climate is more to the Tanu taste. I believe that the division of territory between the two groups reflects a very ancient pattern, perhaps one that goes back to the origins of the dimorphic Race. One might imagine a world of singular niggedness where highland and lowland forms evolved, perhaps interdependent yet antagonistic, With the coming of high civilization and the eventual migration of the race to other worlds in their galaxy, these ancient tensions would be sublimated. But it would seem that Tanu and Firvulag genes never blended completely. From time to time during the history of these people the old rivalries would be resurrected.”

“And crushed by the high-tech majority,” Claude said. “Until this one group of barbarian throwbacks found a perfect refuge instead of coming to the usual quixotic end.”

She nodded her agreement “It was perfect for the exiles, our Pliocene Earth… except for the irony that equally quixotic humans should also have desired to dwell on it.”

She pointed to a pneumatic barge far out on the river. “There goes one of the products of the human advent. Before the humans came, the Tanu had simple rafts of wood. They had little river commerce because of their dislike of water. They supervised their own plantations and even did honest work because there were not so many rama slaves. The torcs for the little apes formerly had to be made by hand in the same manner as their own golden torcs.”

“Do you mean that human know-how enabled mass production?”

“For the ape torcs, yes. And the entire silver and gray system, with its linkage to the golden torcs of the Tanu rulers, was devised by a human psychobiologist. They made him a demigod and he still lives in Muriah, Sebi-Gomnol the Lord Coercer. But I remember the pinched little self-hating man who came to my auberge forty years ago. Then he was called Eusebio Gomez-Nolan.”

“So a human being is responsible for this slave setup? Sweet Lord. Why do we screw things up, wherever we go?”

She gave a short bitter laugh. With her hair straggling in sweat curls about her ears and forehead, she seemed to be scarcely forty-five years old. “Gomnol is not the only traitor to our race. There was a Turkish man of the circus, one of my earliest clients, named Iskender Karabekir. His fondest wish, as he told me, was to train sabertooth tigers to do his bidding. But I have discovered that in this Exile world he devoted himself instead to the domestication of chatikot and heuadotberia and amphicyons, which became pivotal in the subsequent Tanu domination of society. The ancient Hunt and Grand Combat were fought by Tanu and Firvulag afoot. The groups were evenly matched, for what the Firvulag lacked in finesse and sophisticated metafunctions they made up in sheer numbers and a more rugged physique. But a mounted Tanu Hunt was a different matter. And a Grand Combat with Tanu and torced human warriors on chalikoback and Firvulag afoot has become an annual massacre.”

Claude stroked his chin. “Still, there was the Battle of Agincourt, if you’ll pardon my mentioning it.”

“Bof!” said Angélique Guderian. “Longbows will not conquer the Tanu, nor will gunpowder. Not while perverse member of our own human race betray their fellows! Who taught the Tanu physicians how to reverse the human sterilizations? A gynecologist from the planet Astrakhan. A human woman! Not only our talents but our very genes have been placed in the service of these exotics, and many, such as Martha, choose death rather than the degradation of becoming brood stock. Do you know how Martha came to us?”

Claude shook his head.

“She threw herself into the Rhine, hoping to drown herself in the spring flood rather than submit to a fifth impregnation. But she was cast ashore, Dieu merci, and Steffi found her and restored her. There are many others like Martha among us. Knowing them, loving them, and knowing also that I am the one ultimately responsible for their pain, you will understand why I cannot rest until the power of the Tanu is broken.”

The river was turning from shining pewter to gold. On the Black Forest side, the heights of the Feldberg to the south became luminous with the sinking sun, tinted primrose and purple. In order to reach Sugoll, they would have to go up into that high country and cross at least seventy kilometers of mountain forest, and all this before even beginning their search for the Danube.

“Quixotic,” Claude said. He was smiling.

“Are you sorry you agreed to help me? You are an enigma to me, Claude. I can understand Felice, Richard, Martha, the strong-willed ones of our company such ^M Chief Burke. But I have not yet been able to understand you. I cannot see why you came to the Pliocene at all, much less why you agreed to go on this quest for the Ship’s Grave. You are too sensible, too self-posssessed, too, debonaire!”

He laughed. “You have to understand the Polish character, Angélique. It breeds true, even in a Polish-American like me. We were speaking of battles. Do you know which one we Polacks are proudest of? It happened at the beginning of the Second World War. Hitler’s Panzer tanks were rolling into the northern part of Poland and there was no modern weaponry to stop them. So the Pomeranian Cavalry Brigade charged the tanks on horseback, and they were wiped out, man and beast. It was madness, but it was glorious… and very, very Polish. And now suppose you tell me why you decided to come to the Pliocene.”

“It was not because of romanticism,” she said. There was no more of the accustomed asperity in her tone, not even grief. She told her story flatly, as though it were the scenario of a stage play that she had been forced to attend too many times, or even an act of confession.

“In the beginning, when I was only greedy for money, I did not care what kind of world lay on the other side of the time-portal. But later, when my heart was finally touched, it became very different. I attempted to have the travelers send messages back to me, reassuring me about the nature of the Pliocene land. Time and again I gave to sensible-seeming persons materials that I felt certain would survive the reversal of the temporal field. Very early tests by my late husband had shown that amber was best, and so my envelopes were pieces of this material, carefully sliced in half, with little wafers of ceramic to insert. These could be written upon with an ordinary graphite pencil, then sealed in the amber with natural balsam cement. I instructed certain travelers to study the ancient scene, write down their considered judgment of it, then return to the vicinity of the time-gate where the translations invariably took place at dawn. You see, Professor Guderian had long ago established that solar time in the ancient epoch was the same as that of the modern world we lived in. I had wished to give the new arrivals maximum daylight to adjust to the new environment, so I always sent them at sunup. Malheureusement, this unvarying program made it most convenient for the minions of the Tanu to control the portal! Long before it occurred to me to try the amber message holders, the exotics had built Castle Gateway and taken steps to seize all time-travelers immediately upon their arrival.”

“So you never got any messages from the past?”

“Nothing. In later years, we tried more sophisticated techniques for mechanical retrieval of information, but nothing worked. We could get no pictures, no sounds from the Pliocene. The devices always returned to us in a useless condition. Of course, it is easy to see why!”

“And yet you kept sending people through.”

Her face was haunted. “I was tempted again and again to shut down the operation, but the pathetic ones would implore me, and so I continued. Then there came the time when my fearful conscience could no longer be denied. I took the amber materials, constructed a simple trip-lever device to operate the switch of the machine, and came to see for myself this world six million years distant from our own.”

“But…” Claude began.

“In order to elude my devoted staff, who would surely have stopped me, I made the translation at midnight.”

“Ah.”

“I found myself enveloped in a terrible dust storm, a hell of choking wind that threw me to the ground and rolled me as easily as a Russian thistle across the arid plateau. I had taken cuttings of my beloved roses, and in my fright I clung to them as the hurricane tumbled and battered me. I was blown to the lip of a dry watercourse and precipitated into its rocky depths, where I lay unconscious until dawn, badly bruised but otherwise unhurt. By the time the sun rose the sirocco was gone. I spied the Castle and had just made up my mind to go to it for aid when the attendants came trooping ou to wait for the morning’s arrivals.”

She paused and a slow smile stole over her lips. “No time-travelers came that day. My staff was too much in a tumult, you understand. The people from the Castle became very agitated and rushed back inside. Not long thereafter a troop of soldiers came galloping posthaste out of the barbican and rushed off to the east, passing not thirty meters from the bushy cleft where I lay hidden. At the head of the train was an enormously tall exotic man dressed in robes of purple and gold.

“You will understand that I was in great pain from my battering. I crawled into a kind of shallow cave beneath the roots of an acacia tree that grew on the rim of the dry ravine. As the sun climbed, my thirst became dreadful. But this torment was as nothing compared to my agony of soul. Back in the auberge, I had imagined many possible derangements of the Pliocene world, fierce beasts, inhospitable terrain, exploitation of newcomers by the earlier arrivals among the time-farers, even a malfunction of the translational field that would cast the poor travelers into oblivion. But never had I imagined that the ancient epoch would see our planet in thrall to a nonhuman race. All unwitting, I had sent my pathetic, hopeful people into slavery. I turned my face into the dust and asked God to grant me death.”

“Oh, Angélique.”

She did not seem to see or hear him. Her voice was very quiet, barely audible among the rising evening clamor of the Rhineland birds and insects.

“When I finally stopped weeping, I saw a round object half-buried in the dust not an arm’s length away on the ravine floor. It was a melon. The rind was thick and it had not been broken by its rolling across the plateau in the windstorm. When I cut into it with my small couteau de poche I found it sweet and laden with water. And so my thirst was quenched and I lived through the day.

“Very late in the afternoon there came a procession of carts drawn by strange animals. I know now that these were hellads, large giraffes with short necks used for draft purposes. The carts had human drivers and contained vegetables resembling large beetroots, fodder for the Cattle chalikos. The carts entered the fortress by the postern gate and after a time returned laden with manure. As they journeyed back into the lowlands I followed at a far distance. Just before nightfall we came to a kind of farm with the buildings secure behind a stockade. I hid myself in bushes and tried to decide what to do. If I revealed myself to the farm people they would surely recognize me. And was it not possible that they would exact retribution for my betrayal of their dreams? I would accept this punishment if God willed. But I had already begun to suspect that a different role had been ordained to me. So I did not approach the gate of the farm but went instead into a dense forest adjacent to it. I found a spring, ate a small amount of the food in my Survival Unit, and prepared to spend the night in a great cork tree, even as we have sheltered ourselves in this cypress today…”

The other three members of the expedition had wakened on their perches among the higher branches. Now they swung down as slowly and quietly as sloths to take places next to Claude and listen. The old woman, sitting far out from the trunk with her legs dangling, did not seem to notice them.

“Very late in the night, after the moon went down, the monsters came. At first there was a great silence, with all of the jungle noises falling still as though a switch had been cut. I heard a sound of horns and a distant baying. And then it seemed as though the moon were rising again over a ridge of land just north of my tree. There was light of many colors coming from some flaming thing twisting in and out of the trees. It raced down the slope toward me. I heard a noise like a tornado, at once terrible and musical. The fiery apparition became an elfin cavalcade, the Hunt!, and it glowed as it raged downhill. It was chasing something. That I saw when the whirlwind of jeweled riders came into a small glen some two hundred meters away from me. By the bright starlight I saw the, prey shambling along, a huge creature, black as ink, with coiling arms like those of a devilfish springing from its shoulders and eyes like great red lamps.”

“Fitharn!” Richard hissed. Claude gave him an elbow in the ribs. Madame paid no attention to the interruption.

“The black monster dodged among the trees on the slope below me, coming ever closer, with the Hunt in hot pursuit. I have never in my life known such terror. My very soul seemed to shriek with it, although I uttered no sound. With all of my will I prayed for deliverance, clinging to the large branch of my cork tree with eyes tightly shut. There was a noise of carillons and thunderbolts, a buffeting wind, blinding flashes of light that penetrated my closed lids, smells of ordure and ozone and doping perfume. Every nerve end of mine seemed assaulted and overloaded, but still I willed myself to be safe.

— And the Hunt passed by. I knew that I was fainting, but my fingernails dug deeply into the soft cork bark and kept me from falling. There was darkness and I knew nothing. When I awoke… a little man in a tall hat stood beneath my tree looking up at me with starlight shining on his round cheeks and pointed nose. He called out, “Well done, woman, you hid the both of us!”

Claude and the others had to laugh. Madame looked from one to the other in a kind of surprise, then shook her head and allowed herself a small smile. “Fitharn took me in charge and we went to the underground home of one of his confreres, where we were safe from further harassment. Later, when I had recovered my wits, I had long conversations with the Little People and learned the true situation here in the Pliocene world. Because I am who I am, and because of the brief flash of strong metafunction I had shown in concealing us, Fitharn brought me at length to the Firvulag Court at High Vrazel in the Vosges. I proposed that the Firvulag take humans as their allies rather than bedevil them, as had been their custom since the opening of the time-gate. I contacted the soi-disant Lowlife humans of the region in turn and convinced them of the wisdom of the alliance. We engineered several encounters with the gray-torcs to the Firvulag advantage, and the entente was confirmed. King Yeochee bestowed the golden torc upon me after our spies enabled his warriors to ambush and kill Iskender-Kernonn, the Lord of Animals, that same Turk who had earlier used his perverted talents in the service of the Tanu. After that, there were minor triumphs and major failures, refinements of planning, advances and setbacks. But always in my mind I have cherished the hope that one day I would be able to help undo the evil I have done.”

There was a harsh little laugh from the dimness on the other side of the cypress trunk. Martha sat apart from the others in a forked branch. “How noble of you, Madame, to take all of our guilt upon yourself. And the atonement as well.”

The old woman did not reply. She raised one hand to her neck and passed two fingers behind the golden collar as though trying to loosen it. Her deep-set eyes were glittering; but as always, the tears did not fall.

From the mudflats upstream came the basso bellowing of deinotherium elephants. Closer to the tree-refuge some other creature began reiterating a plaintive hoo-oh-hooo, hoo-ah-hooo. Large bats zipped among the palms that clustered on the high ground. Over the backwaters, patches of mist had already coalesced and now extended thickening feelers toward the mainstream of the Rhine.

“Let’s get out of here,” Felice said abruptly. “It’s dark enough now. We’ve got to be across the river before the moon shows over those mountains.”

“Right,” said Claude. “You and Richard help Martha down.”

He held out his own hand to Angélique Guderian. Together they climbed from the tree and made their way to the water’s edge.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Black Forest of Elder Earth was a thoroughly tamed woodland. When seen from a distance its firs and pines did appear dark; but within the twenty-second-century forest itself all was green and pleasant, with manicured pathways that tempted even the laziest hikers to indulge wanderlust without the threat of inconvenience. Only in the southernmost part of the range, around the Fekiberg and its sister peaks, did the terrain rise above a thousand meters. In the twenty-second century the Schwarzwald was thickly peppered with quaint resorts, restored castles, Kurhauser, and mountain villages where out-world visitors were welcomed by costumed inhabitants and mouthwatering Kirschtorten.

The Pliocene Schwarzwald was something else altogether.

Before the erosive action of small Pleistocene glaciers wore the range down, it was higher and more sinister. Facing the rift valley of the Proto-Rhine was an escarpment that rose sheeriy for almost a kilometer and a half, broken only by occasional narrow gorges cut by torrents from the highlands. Foot-travelers approaching the Black Forest from the river had to climb up one of these clefts, following precipitate gametrails or scrabbling over great blocks of granite sheathed in rampant greenery, kept moist even during the dry season by mists rising from chains of cascades. Able-bodied Firvulag hikers were known to have ascended the escarpment in eight hours. It took Madame Guderian and her crippled party three days.

Above the rim of the eastern horizon the true Black Forest began. Nearest the river, where strong winds blew down the trough from the Alps, the spruces and firs grew contorted into fantastic shapes. Some of the trunks resembled dragon coils or writhing brown pythons, or even humanoid giants frozen for ever in agony, their upper limbs woven together into a roof twenty or thirty meters above the ground.

Farther east, this Twisted Forest calmed and straightened. The land of the southern Schwarzwald rose rapidly toward a culminating crest more than two thousand meters high, with three eminences. On the flanks of the western slope were conifers of climactic proportions, white firs and Norway spruces seventy meters tall growing in ranks so dense that when one tree died, it could hardly find room to fall, but instead leaned against supportive neighbors until it decayed and fell to bits. Only rarely was there a break in the forest canopy that allowed Richard to plot their course from the sun or the North Star. They could find no obvious trail, so the ex-spacer had to lay one out, moving from landmark to tedious landmark, never able to get a line of sight more than fifteen or twenty meters long because of the denseness of the trees.

The understorey of this evergreen expanse received very little sun. Its dreary bluish twilight supported almost no low-growing green plants, only saprophytes nourished by the detritus of the great trees. Some of the things that fattened on decomposition were degenerate flowering plants, pale stalks with nodding ghostly blooms of livid white, maroon, or speckled yellow; but paramount among the eaters of the dead were the myxomycetes and the fungi. To the five humans traveling through the Pliocene Black Forest it seemed that these, and not the towering conifers, were the dominant form of life.

There were quivering sheets of orange or white or dusty translucent jelly that crept slowly over the duff of needles and decaying wood like giant amebae. There were bracket fungi, from delicate pink ones resembling baby ears to stiff jumbos that jutted from the trunks like stair treads and were capable of bearing a man’s weight. There were spongy masses of mottled black and white that enveloped several square meters of forest floor as though veiling some unspeakable atrocity. There were airy filaments, pale blue and ivory and scarlet, that hung from rotting limbs like tattered lacework. The forest harbored puffball globes two and a half meters in diameter, and others as small as pearls from a broken string. One variety of fungus cloaked decaying shapes in brittle husks resembling colored popcorn. There were obscene tilings resembling cancerous organs; graceful ranks of upright fans; counterfeit slabs of raw meat; handsome polished shapes like ebony stars; oozing diseased purple phalluses; faerie parasols blown inside out; furry sausages; and mushrooms and toadstools in varieties that seemed to be without number.

At night, they were phosphorescent.

It took the foot-travelers another eight days to traverse the Fungus Forest. During this time they saw no animal larger than an insect; but they would never cease to feel that invisible watchers lurked just outside their field of vision. Madame Guderian assured her companions again and again that the region was safe despite its ominous aspect. There was no source of food for predatory animals in the fungoid realm of life-in-death, much less support for Firvulag, who were notorious trencherfoik. The thickly matted upper branches made it impossible for the Flying Hunt to see anyone moving below. Other Lowlife scouting parties that had penetrated similar forests farther north in the range had reported them empty except for trees, the triumphant fungi, and their parasites.

But still there was the feeling—.

They suffered and grumbled all through the ghastly woods, wading through soft growths that concealed treacherous, ankle-trapping holes. Richard declared that the spores in the air were choking him. Martha drooped in anemic silence after pestering Madame one time too many with a report that something was prowling among the giant toadstools. Claude caught a fierce case of jock itch that crept all the way up to his armpits. Even Felice was ready to scream out loud at the endless trek; she was sure that something was growing in her ears.

When they finally broke free of the Fungus Forest, all of them, even Madame, shouted with relief. They came into a brilliantly sunny alpine meadow that stretched north and south along the slope of an undulating crest. One bald tor rose from a ridge on their left; to the right were two more barren gray domes. Ahead of them and farther east was the rounded height of the Feldberg.

“Blue sky!” cried Martha. “Green grass!” Heedless of her disability, she went bounding over the flower-dotted alp and scrambled to the top of the eastern ridge, leaving the others to follow more slowly. “There’s a little lake down there, not half a klom away!” she called. “And lovely normal trees! I’m going to soak and scrub myself and lie in the sun until I’m cooked to a frazzle. And I never want to see another mushroom again for as long as I live.”

“Say again, sweetie,” Richard agreed. “Not even a truffle.”

They descended to the beautiful little tarn, icy cold in its depths but sun-warmed in shallower little pools around its rocky perimeter, and gave themselves up to the luxury of becoming clean again. Their filthy buckskins were left to soak in a tiny brook that ran from the lake down into the eastern valley. Shrieking like children, they went splashing and diving and swimming and wallowing.

Never since he had entered the Pliocene had Richard been so happy. First he swam to the other side of the tarn and back again. (It was only about fifty meters across.) He found a shallow pothole with the water warmed to precisely the right temperature and floated with the sun glaring redly behind his shut eyelids. Dark sand, scintillating like mica, floored his little pool. He took handfuls of it and rubbed his entire body, even his scalp. Then one last dash across the lake and out onto a hot granite slab to dry.

“You should have tried out for the Polity Olympics,” Martha said.

He crept up a little higher on his rock and peered over the far edge. She was below him, lying flat on her stomach in a sheltered hollow and looking at him with one eye. Bright pink flowers grew in the crevices around her.

“How you feeling now?” Richard inquired. And he thought: Hey! She looked so different clean, relaxed, smiling with one corner of her mouth tilted higher than the other. “I’m much better,” she said. “Why don’t you come down?”

On the opposite shore of the lake, Claude and Madame Guderian lay side by side on decamole cots among the gentians and asters and harebells, baking the miseries out of their old bones and munching bilberries from the low-growing bushes that grew everywhere on the alpine meadow. A stone’s throw away. Felice’s pale-skinned form was bending in rhythmic exertions. There was a regular slapping sound as she beat their soiled clothing against the rocks of the little brook.

“Oh, to be young and energetic again,” said Madame, a lazy smile upon her lips, “She has such enthusiasm for this mad expedition of ours, that little one. And what strength and patience she has shown with poor Martha. It is hard for me to credit your ominous assessment of Felice’s character, mon vieux.”

Claude grunted. “Just a little angel of mercy… Angélique, I’ve been doing some calculating.”

“Sans blague?”

“This isn’t funny. It’s been fifteen days since we left Yeo-chee’s court at High Vrazel. We took eleven of those days just to travel the thirty kloms from the Rhine to the crest of the Schwarzwald. I don’t think we have a hope in hell of getting to the Ries inside of the four weeks’limit, even if we do contact Sugoll. There’s probably another forty or fifty kloms of land travel ahead of us before we even reach the Danube. Then near two hundred kloms down the river to the Ries.”

She sighed. “Probably you are right. But Martha is strong enough to keep up with the rest of us now, so we will press on nevertheless. If we are not back before the Truce begins, we will have to wait until another time to attack Finiah.”

“We can’t do it during the Truce?”

“Not if we hope for the assistance of the Firvulag. This Truce, which covers periods of a month prior to and following the Grand Combat week, is deeply sacred to both exotic races. Nothing will induce them to fight each other during Truce time. It is the time when an of their warriors and Great Ones go to and from the ritual battle, which is held on the WhiteSilver Plain near the Tanu capital. Of course, in olden tunes, when Firvulag sometimes triumphed in the yearly contest, the Little People might host the games on their own Field of Gold. It lies somewhere in the Paris Basin, near a large Firvulag city named Nionel. Since the Tanu expansion, the place has been virtually abandoned. It has not hosted the Combat in forty years.”

“I should think it would be good tactics to go after the mine when the Tanu are out of town. Do we really need the Firvulag?”

“We do,” she said starkly. “There are only a handful of us and the ruler of Finiah never leaves the mine completely undefended. There are always silvers and grays there, and some of the silvers can fly.

“…But the real reason for the matter of timing has to do with my grand design. Strategy, not tactics, must guide us. We do not aim simply to destroy the mine, but rather the entire human-Tanu coalition. There are three steps in the master plan: first, the Finiah action; second, an infiltration of the capital, Muriah, in which the torc factory itself would be destroyed; and third, the closing of the time-portal at Castle Gateway. Originally we had thought to instigate guerilla warfare against the Tanu after the threefold plan was accomplished. Now, with the iron, we will be in a position to demand a genuine armistice and the emancipation of all humans who do not serve the Tanu willingly.”

“When do you see the implementation of phases two and three? During the Truce?”

“Exactly. For these, we do not require Firvulag help. At Truce time the capital is filled with strangers, even Firvulag go there with impunity! A penetration of the torc factory would be greatly simplified then. As for the time-gate…”

Felice came running up as tightly as a mountain sprite. “I can see flashes ever to the east, on the flank of the Feldberg!”

The two old people sprang to their feet. Madame shaded her eyes and followed the girl’s pointing finger. A series of short double flashes came from a high wooded slope.

“It is the interrogation signal, as Fitharn warned us. Somehow, Sugoll has become aware of us entering his domain. Quickly, Felice. The mirror! “The athlete ran back to the brook where the packs lay and returned in a few seconds with a square of thin Mylar mounted on a folding frame. Madame sighted through its central aperture and flashed the response Fitharn had taught them: seven long slow flashes, then six, then five, then four-three-two-one.

They waited.

The reply came. One-two-three-four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight.

They relaxed. Claude said, “Well, they won’t come gunning for us now, at any rate.”

“No,” Madame agreed. Her voice held a touch of sarcasm. “At least Sugoll will meet with us face to face before deciding whether or not to burn out our minds… Eh bien.” She handed the mirror back to Felice. “How long do you think it will take us to reach the foot of the Feldberg? That valley we must cross, it is not too deep, but there are woodlands and meadows where les Criards may lurk, probably a river to cross, and the terrain will be rougher than that of the Fungus Forest.”

“We’ll count on Sugoll keeping his friends and relations under control,” Claude said. “And good solid ground instead of that spongy muck will let us keep moving right along, even if it is a bit steep in places. Barring any unforeseen balls-up, we might make it to the mountain in a dozen hours.”

“Our clothes are drying on the hot rocks,” Felice said. “Give ’em an hour or so. Then we can march on until sundown.”

Madame nodded in agreement.

“Meanwhile, I’ll hunt lunch!” the girl declared brightly. Taking her bow, she went running naked toward a duster of nearby crags.

“Artemis!” exclaimed Madame in admiration.

“One of our old Group Green companions, an anthropologist, used to call her that, too. The Virgin Huntress, goddess of the bow and the crescent moon. Benevolent, if you kept her happy with the occasional human sacrifice.”

“Aliens done! You have a one-track mind, Claude, seeing the child always as a menace. And yet see how perfect she is for this Pliocene wilderness! If only she could be content to live here as a natural woman.”

“She’ll never settle for that.” The paleontologist’s usually kindly face was as hard as the granite around him. “Not so long as there’s one golden torc left in the Exile world.”

“Thank you, Richard,” Martha said, smiling into his eyes, and with his vision still dimmed, she was beautiful enough and it had been very good between them.

“I wasn’t sure you really meant it,” he said. “I didn’t want to hurt you.”

Her gentle laugh was reassuring. “I’m not completely ruined, even though strong men have been known to blanch at the sight of my little white body. The fourth birth was a caesarian, and these donks never heard of a transverse. Just slice ’er open down the middle, grab the precious kid, and pass the catgut and darning needle. It didn’t heal properly. A fifth pregnancy probably would have been the end of me.”

“The filthy swine! No wonder you, uh, I’m sorry. You probably don’t want to talk about it.”

“I don’t mind. Not any more. D’you know? You’re the first man since them. Before this, I couldn’t even bear the thought of it.”

“But Steffi…” he began hesitantly.

“A dear gay friend. We loved each other, Richard, and he took care of me for months when I was really bad, just as though I were his little sister. I miss him dreadfully. But I’m so glad you’re here. All the way through that horrid forest… I watched you. You’re a fine navigator, Richard. You’re a good man. I hoped that you wouldn’t be, revolted by me.”

He pulled himself up into a sitting position, back resting against a great hot boulder. She lay again on her stomach, chin on clasped hands. With her scarred belly and pitifully shrunken breasts hidden, she looked almost normal; but her ribs and shoulder blades were prominent and her skin had a translucency that revealed too many of the blue blood vessels beneath. There were smudgy shadows around her eyes. Her lips were purplish rather than pink as they continued to smile at him. But she had loved him with marvelous passion, this wreck of a handsome woman, and when something within him said: She will die, he felt his heart contract with an amazing, unprecedented pain.

“Why are you here, Richard?” she asked. And without knowing why, he told her the whole story without sparing himself, the dumb sibling rivalry thing, the greedy maneuvering and betrayals that had made him master of his own starship, the ruthlessness resulting in wealth and prestige, the ultimate crime and its punishment.

“I might have guessed,” she said. “We have a lot in common, you and I.”

She had been a Deputy Supervising Engineer on Manapouri, one of the two “New Zealand” planets, where extensive marine mining made up an important part of the economy. A contract had been let for the sigma-field energy-dome of a new township to be built six kilometers beneath the planet’s South Polar Sea. An Old World company sent its people to install the dome generator; approval of each phase of the work was subject to personal inspections by Martha and her staff. She had worked with the offworld technicians for nearly six months, and she and the project head had become lovers. Then, with the generator complex three-quarters completed, she discovered that the contractor had substituted certain structural components when a shipment from Earth went astray. The substitutions were rated at ninety-three percent of the capacity of those called for in the original specs. And everybody knew how ridiculously high those standards had been set, for Manapouri had originally been surveyed by the ultra picky Krondaku. Her lover had pleaded with her. To dismantle the thing and make replacements would lose them months of time, put the job into the red and probably get him the sack for authorizing the sneetch in the first place. Ninety-three percent! That dome generator would keep running in anything short of a Class Four tectonic incident. On this stable-crust world, the chances of that were one in twenty thousand.

And so she had given in to him.

The sigma-field generator complex was completed on time and within budget. A hemispheric bubble of force flowed out from it and pushed back the seawater for a radius of three kilometers. A mining village of fourteen hundred and fifty-three souls sprang up within its security, down beneath the frigid waters near Manapouri’s South Pole. Eleven months later there was a Class Four… 4.18, to be exact. The dome generator failed, the waters reclaimed their hegemony, and two-thirds of the people were drowned.

“The worst thing about it,” she added, “was that nobody ever blamed me. It was right on the knife-edge for the oi, Jtaalspecs, with that 4.18. I knew that the thing would have held if we hadn’t sneetched, but nobody else thought to question it. It was a borderliner, a tossup, and the thing had crapped out. Tough. The generator complex was so smashed up by the quake and turbidity currents that they didn’t bother with much of a fail-analysis. There was more important work to be done on Manapouri than dredge through half a klom of sediment looking for broken parts.”

“What about him?”

“He had been killed a few months earlier at a job on Pelon-su-Kadafiron, a Poltroyan world. I thought of killing myself but I couldn’t. Not then. I came here instead, looking for God knows what. Punishment, probably. My executive mind-set was all wiped out and I was completely switch-off. You know, take me, stomp me, use me, just don’t make me have to think… The stud farm setup I landed in after the trip from Castle Gateway seemed like a mad dream. They only take the best of the women for breeding stock. Those under forty, natural or rejuvenated, those who aren’t too ugly. The rejects are kept sterile and made available to the gray torcs and the bareneck males. But us keepers had fertility restored by Tanu physicians, and then we were sent to the Finiah pleasure dome. Would you believe there were lots of dopey broads like me who just lay there and took it? I mean, if a dame didn’t mind the basic shabbiness of being used, it was a hotsheet paradise. I understand that the Tanu women are better than the men when it comes to incendiary sex, but the men left no chime un-rung as far as I was concerned. The first few weeks were a nympho’s delight. And then I got pregnant.

“All the little expectant moms are treated like royalty by the Tanu. My first baby was blond and adorable. And I’d never had any, and they let me nurse him for eight months. I loved him so much I almost came up sane. But when they took him away, I went back on psycholine and wallowed around the pleasure dome with all the rest of the screwed-silly tarts. The next pregnancy was awful and the baby turned out Firvulag. The Tanu sire them one time in seven on humans and one time in three on their own women; but Firvulag parents never have Tanu children. At any rate, they didn’t let me nurse the poor little spook, just took him out and left him in the traditional spot in the woods. I hadn’t even recovered from him when they were trying to knock me up again. But by then, all the fun had gone out of it. I was sobering up, maybe. It’s bad to be too sane in the pleasure dome… whether you’re a human female or a human male. Too many of those Tanu blasts and you start hurting instead of skyrocketing. It happens sooner with some than with others, but if you’re the average human, after a while Tanu sex starts killing you.”

“Yeah,” said Richard.

She looked at him quizzically. He gave a small humiliated nod. She said, “Welcome to the club… Well, I had another blond baby and then a fourth. The last was the caesarian, four and a half kilos of lovely fat girl-child, they said. But I was delirious for a week, so they farmed her out to a wet nurse and gave me six whole months of peace to pull my poor old bod back in shape. They even gave me a treatment with their Skin, which is a kind of poor man’s regen-tank, but it didn’t do much good. The practitioner said my mind-tone was wrong for it, just as it was wrong for a gray torc. But I knew that I just didn’t want to get well and have more babies. I wanted to die. So one lovely night I slipped quietly into the river.”

He could think of no words to comfort her. The uniquely feminine abasement was a horror beyond his understanding, although he pitied her and raged inwardly against the ones who had used her, planted a half-human parasite inside of her that fed on her, kicked against her internal organs and belly wall, then violated her again as it burst out into the open air. God! And she’d said that she loved the first baby! How was it possible? (He would have strangled the little bastards before they drew their first breath.) But she’d loved one, and would have loved the others, likely as not, if they hadn’t been taken away. She’d loved those pain givers, those unworthy children. Could a man ever make sense of the way of women?

And you’d think she’d never want to look at another male. But somehow she’d fathomed his own need and, yes!, needed him as well. She might even like him a little. Was she as generous as all that?

Almost as though she read his thoughts, she gave a sensuous little chuckle and beckoned him back to her. “We still have time. If you’re the man I think you are.”

“Not if it would hurt you,” he found himself saying even as he came back to life. “Never if it would hurt you.” But she only laughed again and pulled him down. Women were amazing.

Off in a remote little nook of his brain, something was typing out a message to him, a conviction that grew to enormous, almost frightening, proportions as the exquisite tension built to its culmination. This person was not “women.” She was not, as all the others had been to him, an abstraction of feminine sexuality, a comforter, a receptacle for physical release. She was different. She was Martha.

The message was hard to understand, but any minute now, he was going to figure it out.

CHAPTER FIVE

It had been Martha who gave the Bogle his title.

He had been there, sitting on a boulder and regarding them with a misanthropic glare, when they awoke early the next morning in their camp below the southern flank of the Feldberg. After brusquely identifying himself as an emissary from Sugoll, he had ordered them to pack up without even waiting to let Richard make breakfast. The pace he set up a spur ridge of the mountain was deliberately trying and he would have raced them uphill without a rest if Madame had not occasionally demanded that they stop to catch their breath. Plainly, the dwarfish creature was feeling ill-used at having to serve as a guide and had decided to wreak his own petty revenge.

The Bogle was much shorter than any Firvulag they had ever seen before, and much uglier, with a tubby little torso and skinny arms and legs. His skull was grotesquely compressed to the point of being birdlike. Large black eyes with overlapping pouches were set close together above his toucanish nose. Prominent ears drooped flaccidly at the upper margins. His skin shone greasy reddish brown, and his sparse hair twisted into strands like a string mop. The Bogle’s clothing, belying his physical repulsiveness, was neat and even beautiful: polished boots and a wide belt of carved black leather, wine-red breeches and shirt, and a long vest embroidered in flamelike patterns and studded with semiprecious stones. He wore a kind of Phrygian bonnet with a large brooch positioned just above his scraggly brows, which were knit in what seemed to be a permanent scowl.

Following their trollish guide, the five travelers skirted the mountain ravines, following a tiny but very distinct trail, and passed through a part of the Black Forest that had nearly as many broadleaf trees as conifers. Wherever the Feldberg brooks slowed enough to pool there were bosky dingles clogged with tall ferns and alders, creeping clematis vines, and fall-blooming primroses with poisonously bright blossoms. They came to a hollow where the waters of a hot spring bubbled to the surface. Lush and unhealthy-looking vegetation crowded the steamy swale. A flock of ravens croaked a sardonic greeting from the half-eaten carcass of a small deer that lay near the edge of a mineral-encrusted puddle. More bones, some clean, some furred with thick moss, were strewn about the undergrowth.

Farther east, the rock formations began to change. Colored limestone outcroppings intruded amongst the granite. “Cave country,” Claude remarked to Madame. They were walking side by side now, the path widening as they passed below a wooded cliff. The sun was warm; nevertheless, the paleontologist felt a subterranean chill. In the few places where the rock face was visible, they saw scarlet and blue swallows with long forked tails darting in and out of pocks in the limestone. Spiny-ribbed elephant-ears grew in dense patches beneath the trees. They sheltered clumps of distinctive mushrooms, white-stemed, red caps flecked in white.

“They are here,” the old woman said abruptly. “All around us! Can you not feel them? So many! And all… deformed.”

For a moment, he failed to catch the significance of what she was saying. But it fit, fit with the undercurrent of anxiety that had lurked at the edge of his consciousness ever since early morning. Fit with the surliness of the Bogle, whom Claude had mistaken for an ordinary Firvulag. “Les Criards,” Madame said. “They follow us. One of them leads us. The Howling Ones.”

The path led uphill at an easy slope, entirely free of debris. The swallows flickered among the firs and beeches. Great bars of golden lights slanted down into the forest as if through open windows.

The old woman said, “Such a beautiful place. But there is desolation here, mon vieux, a wretchedness of spirit that at once touches my heart and disgusts me. And it grows stronger.”

He lent her his arm, for she was faltering, apparently for no physical reason. Her face had gone dead white. “We could ask the Bogle to stop,” Claude suggested.

Her voice was dulled. “No. It is necessary to go on… Ah, Claude! You should thank God for not making you sensitive to the emanations of other minds! All sentient beings have secret thoughts, those that remain hidden except to the good God. But there are other thoughts as well, pitched, as it were, on different psychic levels, the nonvocal speech, the currents and storms of emotion. This latter is what I am enveloped in now. It is a most profound enmity, a malevolence that can come only from the most distorted personalities. The Howling Ones! They hate other beings but they hate themselves so much more. And their howling fills my mind…”

“Can’t you shut it out? Defend yourself as you did against the Hunt?”

“If I had been properly trained,” she said forlornly. “But all that I know I have taught myself. I do not know how to counter this horde. They don’t offer any concrete threat that I can seize upon.” Her expression was very near panic. “All they do is hate. With all their strength… they hate.”

“Do they seem to be more powerful than ordinary Firvulag?”

“I cannot be sure of that. But they are different in some unnatural way. That is why I called them deformed. With the Firvulag, and even with the Tanu, human metapsychics can feel a certain mental kinship. It is no matter that the exotic is an enemy. But never could I be akin to these Criards! I have never before been so close to so many of them. Only rarely did we encounter them in our little enclave within the Vosges, and there they were wary. But these… I…” Her voice broke off, harsh and too high-pitched. Her right fingers stroked the golden torc with a feverish urgency while those of her left hand dug painfully into Claude’s arm. She kept darting her eyes from side to side, scanning the crags. There was nothing unusual to be seen.

Felice, who had been at the tail end of the line behind them, now closed the distance and announced, “I don’t like this place at all. For the past half hour or so I’ve had the damnedest feeling. Nothing at all like those nervous fantods we got in the Fungus Forest, either. This time, there bloody well is something to be afraid of! Come on, Madame, what’s going on?”

“The malign Firvulag, the Howlers, are all around us. Their mental projections are so powerful that even you, in your latent state, can perceive them.”

The blonde athlete’s mouth tightened to a straight line and her eyes flashed. In her unaccustomed buckskin garb, she looked like a schoolgirl playing at Red Indians. She asked Madame, “Are they getting ready to attack?”

“They will do nothing,” the old woman replied, “without the permission of their ruler, Sugoll.”

“Only mental intimidation, damn their eyes! Well, they don’t scare me!” Felice unstrapped the bow from her pack and checked the arrows expertly without losing stride. The cliff had now become a crazy jumble of blocks and pinnacles with the rising of the land. The trees thinned. They could see far out over the intermontane valleys. Even the distant Alps were barely visible to the south. The Feldberg itself reared up another thousand meters above them, chopped off in a sheer precipice on its southeastern face as though some Titan had taken an axe to it, mutilating the symmetry of the smoothly rounded crown.

Up at the head of the line, the Bogle was holding up one hand. They had arrived at an alpine park, a meadow surrounded on all sides by steep rocks. Precisely in the center of the area was a haystack-shaped knoll of velvety black stone, veined with a weblike tracery of bright yellow.

“This is it,” said the Bogle. “And here I gladly leave you.”

He folded his arms and, scowling, faded from sight. The scowl lasted longer than the rest of him.

“Well, that’s a hell of a…” Richard began the rounded torso and skinny limbs of the Bogle. Many had disproportionately large hands and feet. Some of the bodies seemed twisted, as with spinal deformities; others had asymmetric bulges under well-made garments, hinting of tumorous growths or even concealed extra limbs. The heads were grotesque: pointed, flattened, ridged like tree bark, crested, even horn-bearing. Some were too large or too small for the supporting body, or monstrously ill-suited, as the tiny female head with the lustrous curls and lovely features that sat incongruously on the hunched form of a young chimpanzee. Almost all of the faces were hideous, warped or swollen or stretched beyond any semblance of humanoid normality. There were faces covered with red and blue wattles, with hair, with saurian scales, with weeping scabs, with cheeselike exudate. There were eyes bulbous, beady, stalked, misplaced, superfluous. Some of the creatures had mouths so wide as to be froglike; others lacked lips altogether, so that the stumps of rotted teeth were exposed in perpetual ghastly grins. Those mouths ranged from animal muzzles grafted onto otherwise normal skulls to improbable vertical slits, coiled trunks, and parrot beaks. They opened to show fat tusks, close-set narrow fangs, drooling gums, and tongues that might be black or fringed or even double or triple.

Very gently, the misbegotten throng howled again.

On the black rock now sat a fairly tall bald-headed man. His face was beautiful and his body, clad from neck to heel in a tight-fitting purple garment, that of a superbly muscled humanoid.

The howling ceased abruptly. The man said, “I am Sugoll, the lord of these mountains. Say why you come.”

“We bring,” Madame said in a barely audible voice, “a letter from Yeochee, High King of the Firvulag.”

The bald man smiled tolerantly and held out one hand. Claude had to support Madame Guderian as she approached the rock.

“You are afraid of us,” Sugoll observed as he perused the piece of vellum. “Are we so disgusting to human eyes?”

“We fear what your minds project,” Madame said. “Your bodies can only stir our compassion.”

“Mine is an Illusion, of course,” said Sugoll “As the greatest of all these”, he swept one arm to encompass the quivering mass of creatures, “I must naturally be their superior in all things, even in physical abomination. Would you like to see me as I really am?”

Claude said, “Mighty Sugoll, this woman has been severely affected by your mental emanations. I was once a life-scientist, a paleobiologist. Show yourself to me and spare my friends.”

The bald man laughed. “A paleobiologist! See if you can classify me, then.” He stood upright on his rock. Richard came and took Madame back, leaving Claude standing alone.

There was a brief flash and all of the humans except the old man were momentarily blinded.

“What am I? What am I?” Sugoll cried out “You’ll never guess, human! You can’t tell us and we can’t tell you because none of us knows!” Peal after peal of mocking laughter rang out.

The handsome figure in purple was once again seated on his rock. Claude stood with feet widely planted, his head down on his breast and his lungs pumping. A trickle of blood oozed from his bitten lower lip. Slowly, he raised his eyes to meet Sugoll’s.

“I do know what you are.”

“What’s that you say?” The goblin ruler hitched forward. In one lithe movement he vaulted to the ground and sprang close to Claude.

“I know what you are,” the paleontologist repeated. “What all of you are. You are members of a race that is abnormally sensitive to the background radiation of the planet Earth. Even the Tanu and Firvulag who live in other regions have suffered reproductive anomalies because of this radiation. But you, you have compounded the problem by living here. I daresay you’ve drunk from the deep springs, with their juvenile water, as well as from the shallower fountains and the brooks of melted snow. You’ve probably made your homes in caverns,” he pointed to the yellow-streaked knoll, “full of attractive black rocks like that one.”

“It is so.”

“Unless I miss my guess and my old memory bank’s fritzed out, that rock is nivenite, an ore containing uranium and radium. The deep springs are likely to be radioactive, too. During the years that you people have lived in this region, you’ve exposed your genes to many times the radiation dose experienced by your fellow Firvulag. This is why you’ve mutated, why you’ve changed into… what you are.”

Sugoll turned and stared at the velvet-black rock. Then he threw back his beautifully formed illusionary skull and howled. All of his troll and bogle subjects joined in. This time the sound was not terrifying to the humans, only unbearably poignant.

At length, the Howling Ones ceased their racial dirge. Sugoll said, “On this planet, with only primitive genotechnology, there can be no hope for us.”

“There is hope for generations unborn if you move away from here, say, into more northerly regions where there are no concentrations of dangerous minerals. For those of you alive today… well, you have your powers of illusion-making.”

“Yes,” the exotic ruler agreed, his voice flat. “We have our illusions.” But then the implications of what Claude had said began to reveal their true import to him. He cried out, “But can it be true? What you said about our children?”

The old man said, “You need advice from an experienced geneticist. Any human with that background has probably been enslaved by the Tanu. All I can tell you is a few basic generalizations. Get out of this area to put a stop to new mutations. The worst of you are probably sterile. The fertile people will likely have recessives for normality. Inbreed the most normal among you to fix the alleles. Bring normal germ plasm into the population by mending your fences with the other Firvulag, the normal ones. You’ll have to use your illusion-making powers to make yourselves attractive as potential mates, and you’ll have to be socially compatible to encourage the mixing. That means no more bogey-man mentality.”

Sugoll gave a bark of ironic laughter. “Your presumption passes belief! Emigrate from our traditional lands! Give up our mating traditions! Make friends with our old enemies! Marry them!”

“If you want to change your genetic pattern, that’s the way to start. There’s a long shot, too… if we should ever manage to liberate humanity from the Tanu. There just might happen to be a human genetic engineer among the time-travelers. I don’t know exactly how the Tanu Skin works, but it may be possible to utilize it to alter your grossly mutated bodies back into a more normal form. We were able to do this in some cases, using the regeneration-tanks of the future world that I came from.”

“You have given us much to ponder.” Sugoll was more subdued. “Some of the intelligence is bitter indeed, but we will think on it. Eventually, we will make our decision.”

Madame Guderian now stepped forward and resumed her role of leader. Her voice was firm; her color had returned. “Mighty Sugoll, there is still the matter of our mission. Our request of you.”

The exotic clenched his fist, which still held Yeochee’s message. The vellum crackled. “Ah, your request! This royal command was useless, you know. Yeochee has no power here, but doubtless he did not care to admit it to you. I allowed you to enter our territory on a whim, curious as to the extremity that would make you take such a risk. We had planned to amuse ourselves with you before finally permitting you to die…”

“And now?” Madame inquired.

“What do you ask of us?”

“We seek a river. A very large one, rising in this area, which flows eastward until it reaches the great half-salty lagoons of the Lac Mer hundreds of kilometers from here. We hoped to travel upon this river to the site of the Ship’s Grave.”

There was a surprised chorus of howls.

“We know the river,” Sugoll said. “It is the Ystroll, a truly mighty flood. We have a few legends of the Ship. Early in the history of our people on this world, we broke away from the main body of the Firvulag and sought independence in these mountains, away from the Hunting and the senseless annual slaughter of the Grand Combat.”

Madame had to explain carefully the human complicity in the recent rise to dominance of the Tanu, as well as her own scheme to restore the old balance of power while freeing humanity. “But to do this, we must obtain certain ancient items from the crater of the Ship’s Grave. If you will furnish us with a guide to the river, we believe that we will be able to locate the crater.”

“And this plan, when will you put it into effect? When might the human scientists be free of the Tanu yoke and able, if Teah wills, to help us?”

“We had hoped to implement the scheme this year, before the start of the Grand Combat Truce. But there is scant hope of this now. Only twelve days remain. The Ship’s Grave lies at least two hundred kilometers from here. It will doubtless take us half of the remaining time just to walk to the head of navigation on the river.”

“That is not so,” Sugoll said. He called out, “Kalipin!”

The Bogle stepped forth from the throng. His formerly surly face was transfigured by a broad smile. “Master?”

“I do not understand these kilometers. Tell the humans how it is with the Ystroll.”

“Below these mountains,” the Bogle said, “are the caverns where we make our homes. But at other levels, some deeper, some shallower, are the Water Caves. They are a maze of springs, bottomless pools and streams flowing through the blackness. Several rivers have their sources in the Water Caves. The Paradise, which flows past Finiah to the northwest, is one. But the mightiest torrent born beneath our mountains is the Ystroll.”

Claude exclaimed, “He could be right! There were underground tributaries to the Danube even in our own time. Some said they came from Lake Constance. Others postulated a connection to the Rhine.”

The Bogle said, “The Ystroll emerges as a full-grown river into a great lowland to the northeast. If you enter the Water Caves at Alliky’s Shaft via the lift buckets, you can pick up the Dark Ystroll not two hours’ march from here. Then it is a subterranean water-journey of but a single day to the Bright Ystroll, that which flows beneath the open sky.”

Madame asked Sugoll, “Would your boatmen guide us along the underground section?”

Sugolldid not speak. He lifted his eyes to the surrounding crowd of monstrosities. There was a musical chorus of howls. The goblin shapes began to shift and change, and the terrible swirling pattern of the sky calmed. The mental energies of the little people relaxed from the projection of undisciplined hatred and self-loathing and began to weave gentler illusions. The dreadful deformities faded, a throng of miniature men and women took the place of the nightmares.

“Send them,” sighed the Howling Ones.

Sugoll bowed his head in acknowledgment. “It will be done.”

He arose and lifted his hand. All of the small people repeated the gesture. They became as tenuous as mountain mist burning away in the noon sunlight.

“Remember us,” they said as they vanished. “Remember us.”

“We will,” Madame whispered.

The Bogle went trotting away, beckoning for them to follow. Claude took Madame Guderian’s arm, and Richard, Martha, and Felice came trailing behind.

“Only one thing,” the old woman said to Claude in a low tone. “What did he really look like, this Sugoll?”

“You can’t read my mind, Angélique?”

“You know I cannot.”

“Then you’ll never know. And I wish to God,” the old man added, “that I didn’t.”

CHAPTER SIX

Late in the evening, when the giant hawkmoths and the flying squirrels played their aerial games above the wooded canyon of Hidden Springs Village, seven men bearing six heavy sacks came home to the Lowlife settlement, led by Khalid Khan. They sought Uwe Guldenzopf, but his hut was empty. Calistro the goat-boy, bringing his animals home from their browsing, informed the seven that Uwe was at the community bathhouse with Chief Burke.

“The Chief is here?” Khalid exclaimed in consternation. “Then the expedition to the Ship’s Grave was a failure?”

Calistro shook his head. He was about five years old, sober and responsible enough to know something of the great plans that were afoot. “The Chief was hurt, so he came back. Sister Amerie fixed his wounded leg, but he still must soak it many times each day… What do you have in the sacks?”

The men laughed. Khalid dropped his load on the ground with a loud clanging sound.

“Treasure!” The speaker was a wiry, shock-haired individual standing just behind Khalid, the only one of the seven not burdened down. The stump of his left arm was wrapped in a wad of dark-stained cloth.

“Let me see!” begged the child. But the men were already on their way up the flat-floored canyon. Calistro hurried his animals into their night pen and rushed to follow.

White starlight shone on a small area of open grass near the banks of the brook that was born of the hot and cold springs’ mingling; however, most of the village lay concealed in deep shadow, the homes and community buildings sheltered beneath tall pines or spreading evergreen oaks that hid them from Finiah’s Tanu sky-searchers. The bathhouse, a large log structure with a low-caved roof overgrown with vines, was built against one of the canyon walls. Its windows were closely shuttered, and a U-shaped passage kept torchlight from the interior from shining out the open door.

Khalid and his men entered into a scene of steamy cheerfulness. It seemed that half the village had gathered in here on this rather chilly evening. Men, women, and a few children splashed in stone-lined hot or cold pools, lolled in hollow-log tubs, or simply lounged about gossiping or playing backgammon or card games.

Uwe Guldenzopf’s voice rang out over the communal din. “Hoy! Look who’s back home again!” And the Lowlives raised a shout of welcome. Somebody yelled, “Beer!” And one of Khalid’s grimy contingent appended a heartfelt, “Food!” The boy Calistro was sent to roust out the village victualers while the new arrivals pushed through a gabbling, laughing mob toward an isolated tub where Peopeo Moxmox Burke sat, his long graying hair stringy in the bathhouse vapors and his craggy face atwitch as he suppressed a delighted grin.

“How,” quoth he.

“Beats me,” the Pakistani metalsmith. “But we did it.” He dropped his sack on the stone floor and opened it, taking out a lance-head rough from the casting mold. “Secret weapon, Mark I.” Turning to one of the other men, he groped in his sack and produced a handful of smaller objects, approximately leaf-shaped. “Mark II. You sharpen ’em, they’re arrowheads. We’ve got about two hundred and twenty kilos of iron all told, some of it cast like these, some in bars for miscellanea, ready for forging. What we have here is medium-carbon steel, smelted in the best antique style. We built us a forced-draft furnace fueled with charcoal and drafted with six skin bellows hooked up to decamole tuyeres. Carbon from charred bulrushes. We buried the furnace so we can go back and make more iron when we’ve a mind to.”

Burke’s eyes glistened. “Ah, mechaieh! Well done, Khalid! And all the rest of you, too, Sigmund, Denny, Langstone, Gert, Srnokey, Horai. Well done, all of you. This could be the breakthrough we’ve all been dreaming of, praying for! Whether or not the others succeed at the Ship’s Grave, this iron will give us a fighting chance against the Tanu for the first time.”

Uwe stood sucking his meerschaum, his gaze wandering over the tattered and soot-stained smelters. “And what happened,” he inquired, “to the other three of you?”

The grins of the men disappeared. Khalid said, “Bob and Vrenti stayed too long one evening at the ore pit. When we came to check up on them, they were gone. We never saw a trace of them again. Prince Francesco was off hunting for the pot when the Howlers nailed him.”

“They let us have him back, though,” said the skinny hatchet-faced man named Smokey. “Day later, poor Frankie came staggerin’ back into camp starkers. They’d blinded and gelded him and cut off his hands, and then really got down to business with hot pitch. His mind was gone, o’ course. Small hope the Howlers blinded him before they had their fuckin’ fun ’n’ games.”

“Suffering Christ,” growled Uwe.

“We got a bit back,” Denny offered. His black face flashed a wry smile.

“You did,” said the bandy-legged little Singhalese named Homi. He explained to Chief Burke, “On our way home, a Howler came at us in broad daylight, oh, maybe forty klom down the Moselle from here. All dressed up in his bloody monster suit like a great winged naga with two heads. Denny let him have an iron-tipped arrow in the guts and he went down like a rotten willow tree. And would y’believe? All that was left was this hunchbacked dwarf with a face like a stoat!”

The men grunted in reminiscence and a couple of them whacked Denny on the back. The latter said, “At least we know now that the iron works on both kinds of exotic, right? I mean, the Howlers are nothing but screwed-up Firvulag. So if our noble spook allies, ever forget who their friends are…”

There were murmurs of agreement and a few quiet laughs.

Chief Burke said, “It’s a point to keep in mind, although God knows we need Firvulag help to bring off Madame’s plan against Finiah. The Little People were agreeable to the original scheme. But I’m afraid adding iron to the equation might give them second thoughts.”

“Just wait’ll they see us take out some Tanu with the iron,” Smokey said confidently. “Just wait’ll we equalize things with them dog-collar sonofabitches! Why, the damn Firvulag’ll kiss our feet! Or bums! Or somethin’.”

Everybody roared.

An excited young voice from among the crowd of villagers shouted, “Why should we hold back on the Tanu until Finiah? There’s a caravan going to Castle Gateway in two days. Let’s sharpen up some arrows and bag us an Exalted One right away!”

A few of the others yelled approval. But Chief Burke hauled himself out of his bath like an enraged bull alligator and yelled, “Simmer down, you turkey-turd shlangers! Nobody touches this iron without permission from me! It has to be kept secret. Do you want the whole Tanu chivalry on our necks? Velteyn would send out a screech like a goosed moose if we tipped our hand. He might bring in Nodonn, even call for reinforcements from the south!”

They mumbled at this. The aggressive youngster called out, “When we use iron in the Finiah attack, they’ll know. Why not now?”

“Because,” Burke drawled, in the sarcastic tone he had once used to freeze the collops of inept fledgling advocates, “the attack on Finiah will come just prior to the Truce for the Grand Combat. None of the other Tanu will pay much attention to Velteyn’s troubles then. You know the way these exotics’ minds work. Nothing, but nothing, gets in the way of preparations for the glorious shemozzle. Two or three days before Truce, when we hope to strike, not a Tanu on Earth will come to the aid of Finiah. Not even to help their pals, not even to save their barium mine, not even to beat back humans armed with iron. They’ll all be hot to head south to the big game.”

The crowd fell back to palaver over the amazing single-mindedness of the exotic sportsmen, and Burke began to get dressed. Uwe waggishly suggested that the Tanu were nearly as bad as the Irish for loving a fight without considering the long-view consequences. There was universal laughter at this and not a single son nor daughter of Erin’s Isle rose to defend the racial honor. The thought flashed into Burke’s mind that there was a reason for this, and he ought to know what it was; but at the same moment Khalid Khan caught sight of the red man’s healing wound.

“Mashallah, Peo! You did scratch yourself up a bit, didn’t you?”

Burke’s left leg was hideously indented at the calf by a purplish-red scar over twenty cents in length. He grunted. “Souvenir of a one-horned chozzer. It killed Steffi and damn near did for me by the time Pegleg shlepped me back here to Amerie. Galloping septicemia. But she caught it. Looks like hell, but I can walk, even run, if I care to pay the price.”

Uwe reminded him, “The meeting of the Steering Commitee. Tonight. Khalid should come.”

“Right. But first we have to see to the needs of this gang. How about it, men? Food and drink’s on the way, but is there anything else we can do for you now?”

Khalid said, “Sigmund’s hand. Aside from our three deaders, he’s the only casualty.”

“What happened?” Burke asked.

Sigmund sheepishly hid his stump. “Aw. I was stupid. Giant salamander sprang at me, fanged me right in the palm. You know there’s only one thing to do, the way their venom works…”

“Sig was bringing up the rear,” Denny said. “All of a sudden we missed him. When we went back to investigate, there he was putting on a tourniquet cool as you please, with his vitredur axe and his mitt lying on the ground beside him.”

“You come along with us to Amerie’s place,” the Chief said. “We’ll have her check it out.”

“Aw, it’s all right, Chief. We put plenty of AB and progan on it.”

“Shut your pisk and come along.” The Chief turned to the others. “The rest of you boys relax and eat and have a couple of days’ sleep. There’ll be a big council of war, a contingent one, anyhow, inside of a week, when the volunteers from the other settlements start showing up. We’ll need you to work on this iron when we get the blacksmith shop set up some place where the Firvulag won’t spot it. Till then, I’ll take charge of the stuff. Put it out of temptation’s reach.”

Then Burke raised his voice so that the entire bathhouse could hear him. “All of you! If you value your own lives, and if you give a damn about the liberty of humans who are still enslaved, forget about what you’ve seen and heard here tonight.”

A breath of assent rose from the assemblage. The Chief nodded and hoisted two of the heavy sacks. Khalid and Uwe dragged away the other four and they moved out of the bathhouse, trailed by Sigmund.

“The meeting is at Madame’s cottage as usual,” Burke told the metalsmith as he limped along. “Amerie’s living there now. We put her on the committee by acclamation.”

Uwe said, “That nunnie is some medic. She shrank Max! so we don’t have to keep him locked up anymore. And poor Sandra, no more suicidal threats now that the fungus is cured. Then there’s Chaim’s eyelid, all rebuilt, and she healed that big mother of an ulcer on Old Man Kawai’s foot.”

“That’ll make for quieter meetings,” Khalid remarked. “One less thing for the old boy to complain about. This nun sounds like a handy lady to have around.”

The Chief chuckled. “I didn’t even mention the way she cleaned up sixteen cases of worms and almost all the jungle rot. Madame might have to do some fancy politicking in the next election if she wants to hold on to the freeleadership of this gang of outlaws.”

“It never struck me that she relished the honor.” Khalid was acerbic. “Any more than you did when you were in the hot seat.”

They plodded along, making almost no sound on the path that wound beneath the sheltering trees. The long canyon had many little dead-end tributaries from which the numerous springs debouched. Most of the cottages had been built close to these natural water supplies. There were some thirty homes altogether, in which dwelt the eighty-five human beings who made up the largest Lowlife settlement in the known Pliocene world.

The four men crossed a rill on stepping-stones and headed up one of the rocky clefts to where a distinctive little house stood under a huge pine. The cottage was not built like the others of prosaic logs or wattle and daub, but of neatly mortared stone, washed white with lime and reinforced with dark half-timbering. It was eerily evocative of a certain elder-world dwelling in the hills above Lyon. Madame’s rose cuttings, nourished by the manure of mastodons, had burgeoned into rampant climbers that all but smothered the thatched roof in blossoms. The night air was heavy with their perfume.

The men came up the path, then halted. Standing in their way was a tiny animal. Stiff-legged, its oversized eyes gleaming, it growled.

“Hey, Deej!” Burke laughed. “It’s just us, pupikeh. Friends!”

The little cat growled louder, the low nimble moving up the scale to become a threatening howl. It stood its ground.

Chief Burke put down his burden and knelt with one hand outstretched. Khalid Khan stepped behind Sigmund, a memory and a terrible suspicion crowding to the fore of his mind. A memory of a rainy night inside a Tree when the cat had growled like this before. A suspicion of a valued companion who had been too good a woodsman to be surprised by the relatively sluggish attack of a giant salamander…

Khalid slipped open the mouth of his sack just as the cottage door swung wide to show Amerie’s veiled figure silhouetted against dim lamplight.

“Dejah?” the nun called, rattling her rosary beads in what was evidently some signal. She caught sight of the men. “Oh, it’s you, Chief. And Khalid! You’re back! But what…”

The turbaned metalsmith seized the hair of the one they had called Sigmund. With his other hand he pressed something gray and hard against the man’s throat.

“Do not move, soor kabaj, or you are dead, even as your brother before you.”

Amerie screamed and Uwe uttered an obscenity, for Khalid was suddenly struggling with a gorgon. Instead of hair, the Pakistani clutched writhing little vipers growing from Sigmund’s scalp. These struck, sinking tiny fangs into flesh that puffed up, throbbed, as quasidcadly venom flooded the blood vessels and went racing toward Khalid’s heart.

“Stop, I say!” roared the anguished smith. Involuntarily, his right arm tightened, driving the dull point of the iron lance-blank into the soft hollow below the monster’s voicebox.

The thing emitted a gurgling squeal and went limp. Khalid sprang away from the falling body, dropping the iron. It hit the earth with a dull thud and came to rest close beside the dead shape-changer. Amerie and the three men stared down at the creature, which could have weighed no more than twenty or thirty kilos. Flattened little dugs identified it as a female. Its bald cranium was monstrously compressed just above the eyes and elongated backward into a triangular bony collar. It had a mere hole for a nose and a massive lower jaw with loose, peg-like teeth. The body was almost globular, the limbs spiderishly thin, with the left forepaw missing.

“It’s not… a Firvulag,” Amerie managed to say.

“A Howler,” Burke told her. “Some biologists believe they’re a Firvulag mutation. Each one is supposed to have a different true shape. All hideous.”

“You see what she was trying to do, don’t you?” Khalid’s voice was shaking from reaction and chagrin. He felt his left hand, which was now completely normal. “She saw us kill her mate with iron, and had to find out what the new weapon was. So she must have crept up on Sigmund as he marched at the end of the line and… she took his place. Cut off her hand so she wouldn’t have to carry the iron.”

“But they’ve never masqueraded as humans!” Uwe exclaimed. “What could have been its motive?”

“Look at her, dressed in rags,” Amerie said. She knelt down in the light from the doorway to examine the goblin body. One of the Howler’s crude skin boots had dropped off in the struggle, exposing a humanoid foot, miniaturized but as perfectly formed as that of a child. There was a pathetic blister at the heel; evidently the little being had had to hurry to keep pace with the faster humans.

The nun replaced the boot, straightened the pipestem legs, closed the glazed eyes. “She was very poor. Perhaps she hoped to discover information valuable enough to sell.”

“To the normal Firvulag?” Burke suggested.

“Or to the Tanu.” The nun got up and dusted the front of her white habit.

Khalid said, “There might be others. Others who watched us at the smeltery. If this one could change to human shape, how will we ever be sure…”

Burke picked up the iron blade, grasped the metalsmith’s arm, and drew the rough lancehead across the skin. A few drops of dark blood sprang from the abrasion. “You’re real enough, anyhow. I’ll go test the rest of the crew right away. Later, we’ll work out something a little less crude. Pinprick, maybe.”

He limped away toward the bathhouse. Uwe and Khalid hauled the precious bags of iron into the rose-covered cottage, then returned to where Amerie stood over the body. She held the cat, which was still gently growling.

“What shall we do with her, Sister?” Khalid inquired.

Amerie sighed. “I have a large basket. Perhaps you can put her in the springhouse for me. I’m afraid I’ll have to dissect her tomorrow.”

As the Steering Committee waited for Chief Burke to return to the cottage, the Victualer in Chief offered samples of a new beverage. “We took some of that lousy raw wine of Perkin’s and steeped this little forest wildflower in it.”

Everybody sipped. Amerie said, “That’s nice, Marialena.” Uwe said something in German under his breath. “You know what you’ve done, woman? You’ve reinvented Mai-wein!”

“That’s it! That’s it!” Old Man Kawai piped. He was only eighty-six; but since he had declined rejuvenation on a matter of principle, he resembled an unwrapped Oriental mummy. “Most refreshing, my dear. Now if we can only produce a decent sake…”

The cottage door opened and Peopeo Moxmox Burke stooped to enter. The other committee members sat stark still until the red man gave a nod. “They were all kosher. I tested not only the smelters, but all the rest of the folks in the bathhouse as well.”

“Thank heaven,” said the Architect in Chief. “What a thought, shape-changers infiltrating our people!” He wagged his neatly trimmed muttonchops, managing to look like an accountant who had discovered that a valued client was cooking the books.

“Neither Firvulag nor Howlers had any reason to try this trick before,” the Chief warned. “But now, with the attack coming up and the iron as a maybe not-so-secret weapon, we’re going to have to be alert for other attempts. When the volunteers start arriving, every single one must be tested. And we’ll test all participants before every important meeting or briefing.”

“My responsibility,” said Uwe, who was Hunting and Public Safety. “Whip me up some needles, Khalid?”

“As soon as I can get the forge hot tomorrow.”

The Chief took his place with the other seven committee members around the table.

“All right, let’s get this over as quickly as possible so Khalid can get some rest. As Deputy Freeloader, I call this meeting of the Steering Committee to order. Old business. Structures. Let’s have it, Philemon.”

“The huts at the Rhine staging area have been completed,” said the architect. “Everything is ready there except the main shelter pavilion. The boys will have our Hidden Springs visitor dorm ready in another two or three days.”

“Good,” said the Chief. “Public Works. Vanda-Jo.”

A taffy-haired woman with the face of a madonna and the voice of a drill sergeant spoke up. “We’ve finished the masked trail from here to the staging area. A hundred and six bloody kilometers, invisible from the air. Corduroyed the last two kloms through the swamp, and all that wasn’t a bitch! Still putting up the thorn boma around the staging camp to keep most of the critters out and the recruits in.”

“How about the launching ramps?”

“Decided on pontoons. Inflated skins and boarding. Put ’em up at the last minute. Pegleg and his lads are contributing the skins.”

“Good. Hunting and Public Safety.”

“Nothing much new from me,” Uwe said. “Most of my people are working with Vanda-Jo or Phil. I’ve liaised with the commissary at High Vrazel to help with quantities of game and staples when the extra bods start arriving. And we’ve set up a procedure for processing new arrivals here at Hidden Springs before sending them to the river.”

“Sounds okay. Domestics.”

Old Man Kawai pursed his scored lips. “There is no way we can come up with more than a hundred boiled-leather hard hats and chest guards by D-Day. You know how long it takes to shape and dry that stuff, even with the forms filled with hot sand. The volunteers are just going to have to go mostly bare-ass unless you want our people deprived. Do shimasho? I’ve done my best, but I’m no miracle man.”

“The shortage can’t be helped,” Burke said soothingly. “How about the camouflage nets?”

“We’ll be putting the big one in position tomorrow, just in case they get back early with the exotic flyer.” The wizened ancient threw an anxious glance at the Chief. “Do you really, think they’ve got a chance, Peo?”

“Not much of one,” Burke admitted “But we won’t give up hope until the last hour before the Truce… Human Services.”

“Linen bandages ready,” Amerie said. “We’re assembling stores of oil and alcohol and all of the AB we can scrape up. Fifteen fighters have been rough-trained as front-line medics.” She paused, her face furrowed with determination. “I want you to change your mind about having me accompany the fighters, Peo. For the love of God, when will they need me more than in a battle?”

The Native American shook his head. “You’re the only doctor we have. Probably the only one in the Lowlife world. We can’t have you at risk. There’s the future to think about. If we do liberate Finiah, we may be able to de-torc other medical people. If we fail and the troops come across the Rhine to our staging area… it may be a long time until the next war. Our fighters will tend their own injuries. You stay here.”

The nun sighed.

“Industry,” said Burke.

“We brought back two hundred and twenty kilos of iron,” Khalid said. “Four of our men died. We have enough experienced people left to begin final work on the weapons as soon as we get some sleep.”

There were somber congratulations all around.

“Provisioning.”

“We’ve enough stored here to feed five hundred people for two weeks,” Marialena said. “That does not include the five tons of instant rations we’ll distribute to fighters going down to camp. You don’t want any cooking going on down by the Rhine where the Tanu might spot the smoke.” She pulled a handkerchief from the sleeve of her pink and yellow gown and mopped her ample brow. “Those poor souls are going to curse pemmican and parched bulrush roots before this thing is over.”

“If that’s all they curse,” Burke said, “they’ll be lucky. All right, that leaves my report. Warlord in Chief. I’ve received word from Pallol, the Firvulag generalissimo, that his forces will hold themselves combat-ready for the last three days in September. Under optimal circumstances we’ll mount the attack before dawn on the twenty-ninth, which will give us nearly two full fighting days before the Truce officially begins on October first at sunrise. After that, we humans’ll be on our own, and Finiah better be ready for mop-up. I’ll have more details on plans of attack at the war council later. Okay? Now, new business. We’ll consider the matter of the Howler spy as already introduced and sent to Public Safety for action.”

“The final preparation of the iron weapons,” Khalid said. “My men will soundproof one of the vented caves and turn it into a smithy, I’ll need some help from Phil’s people.”

“More new business?”

“We will need more alcoholic drink,” Marialena said. “Mead or beer from the Firvulag. I can’t have the volunteers swilling our young wines.”

Burke chuckled. “Perish the thought. Uwe, will you sound out the High Vrazel people on that?”

“Check.”

“Any more new business?”

Amerie hesitated. “Perhaps it’s too soon to bring this up. But there is the matter of the second phase of Madame’s plan.”

“Hai!” cried Old Man Kawai. “If Finiah is a success, Madame will want to send others south immediately!”

Philemon was uneasy. “We’ll do well to accomplish even a small part of the first phase of Madame’s plan, much less the other two. I say, leave this to Madame to work out when she returns. It’s her scheme. Perhaps she and that wild little person, Felice, will have worked something out.”

“Caracoles,” grumbled Marialena. “I must consider the later phases, even if the rest of you shirk your responsibility. If our people must go south without proper provisions, it is I who receive the cowchip bouquet! Ahhh, I’ll do what I can.”

“Thank you, querida,” the Chief said peaceably. “I’ll talk with you tomorrow about a possible division of rations. But I think that’s the best we can do for now on Phase Two or Three planning. There are too many unknown factors…”

“Such as who will survive Finiah!” wailed Old Man Kawai. “Or, if we even mount the Finiah attack in the first place!”

Vanda-Jo slapped one hand on the table. “Tails up! No defeatism allowed! We’ve going to hit those high-pocket bastards like they’ve never been hit before. And, Khalid, I’ve got dibbies on one iron arrowhead, if you please. There’s a certain Tanu stud on the other side of the Rhine whose ass belongs to me.”

“If you’re sure that one will do it,” the metalsmith laughed.

“Order,” Burke muttered. “Chair will entertain a motion to table strategy planning for the Grand Combat.”

“So move,” said Amerie. It was quickly affirmed and seconded.

“Any more new business?” the Chief asked. Silence.

“Move adjournment,” said Old Man Kawai. “Past my bedtime.”

“Second,” said Uwe, and the Steering Committee meeting came to an end. Everyone except Chief Burke bade Amerie goodnight and slipped away into the shadows. The quondam judge stretched out his wounded leg for the nun to examine.

At length she said, “There’s nothing more I can do for you, Peo. Hot soaks and moderate exercise to keep the muscles from tightening. I can give you a herendorf to block the pain on D-Day.”

He waved a deprecating hand. “We’ll save it for somebody who really needs it.”

“As you like.”

They went outside, where the village was quiet except for faint insect noises. It was nearly midnight and the moon was still down. Burke craned his neck and studied the starry vault of the sky.

“There it is, just above the rim of the canyon,” he said, pointing.

“What?” she inquired.

“Ah, I forgot you were a newcomer, Amerie. The constellation we call the Trumpet. See the triangular bell, the four bright stars forming the straight tube? Take special note of the mouthpiece star. It’s the most important one in all the sky, at least to the Tanu and Firvulag. On the day when it culminates at midnight over Finiah and High Vrazel, those are the oldest settlements, remember, it will mark the opening of the five-day Grand Combat.”

“The date?”

“By our Milieu calendar, around October 31 or November 1.”

“You’re kidding!”

“It’s true. And the noon culmination that takes place exactly six months later comes around May Day. The exotics have another big show then, which Tanu and Firvulag celebrate separately, the Grand Love Feast. Most popular with the females of the species, it’s said.”

“That’s really very odd,” Amerie said. “I’m no folklorist, but those two dates…”

“I know. Only in our time, there was no good explanation, in astronomy or anything else, for the ritualization of those days rather than any others occurring about the same times.”

“It’s ridiculous to assume a correlation.”

“Oh, certainly.” The Native American’s face was inscrutable in the starlight.

“I mean, six million years.”

“Do you know the significance of the mouthpiece star? It’s a marker. Their home galaxy lies almost directly behind the star.”

“Oh, Peo. How many light years?”

“A hell of a lot more than six million. So in one way, they’ve come even farther away from home than we have, poor devils.”

He gave her a brief salute and limped away, leaving her standing beneath the stars.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“But it isn’t blue!” Felice protested. “It’s brown.”

Madame changed the course of their dinghy to avoid a stranded snag. “The color brown, it lacks that certain cachet. The composer wished to evoke the river’s beauty.”

The girl gave a contemptuous snort as she studied the terrain “This place would never win any prizes. Too dry. It looks like it hasn’t rained for months.” She knelt upright in the bow of the little boat and scanned the open dun-colored slopes with the aid of Madaine Guderian’s little monocular. Only in the arroyos and in the flats nearest the Danube were there areas of green. The widely scattered groves of trees had a dusty bluish look.

“I can see a few small herds of hipparions and antelopes,” the girl said after a time. “Nothing else seems to be alive in those uplands on the left bank. No sign of the crater. Nothing distinctive at all except that little volcano yesterday. You don’t think we could have passed it by, do you? This damn river really rolls”

“Richard will tell us at noon.”

The old woman and the athlete had shared one decamole boat since the party had emerged from the Water Caves nearly two days ago. Claude, Martha, and Richard occupied a second boat that drifted a few dozen meters ahead of them on the swift current of the Bright Ystroll. In spite of the drought they had made splendid time, since the flood received most of its water from the Alps, which shone white in the far south. On the previous night they had pulled up on a wooded gravel bar to sleep, the Bogle having warned them against camping on shore. They were grateful for their isolation when they were awakened later by the cries of hyenas. Claude told them that some of the Pliocene species attained the bulk of large bears and were active predators as well as scavengers.

For navigation, they had one precious map. Back at the Tree, Richard had traced pertinent portions from the fading plass of a venerable Kiimmerley +Frey Strassenkarte von Europa (Zweitausendjahrige Ausgabe), which a nostalgic Lowlife treasured as his dearest memento of times to come. The old road map was dim and difficult to decipher, and Claude had warned Richard that the watershed of the Pliocene Danube was going to be greatly altered during the coming Ice Age by volumes of glacial till washing down from the Alps. The tributary streams of the upper Danube that were shown on the map would likely occupy different positions during the Pliocene; and the bed of the great river itself would lie farther south, twisted all out of recognition. The travelers could not hope to follow Galactic Age landmarks to the Ries crater. But there was one precious bit of data from the old map that would have retained its validity over six million years: the exact longitudinal component in kilometers between the meridian of High Vrazel peak (alias Grand Ballon) and that of the Ries (symbolized on the map by the future city of Nordlingen, which lay within what would be a mere ringwall plain on the Elder Earth). No matter how the Ystroll wandered, it was still bound to cross the Ries meridian. As nearly as Richard had been able to determine from the decrepit plass of the road map, the linear distance was 260 kilometers, three and one-half degrees of longitude east of the “prime meridian” of High Vrazel.

Richard had set his accurate wrist chronometer for precisely noon at High Vrazel and had carefully improvised a quadrant to measure the solar angle. Every day, the quadrant could be used to tell them local noontime, and the difference between this and p.m. noon shown on the watch could be used to calculate the longitude. When they reached the Ries meridian on the Danube, all they had to do was march due north to reach the crater…

One of the figures in the lead boat raised an arm. The craft pulled in to shore.

“There’s a little break in the northern highlands there,” Felice said. “Maybe Richard has decided it’s our best bet.” When they had beached their boat next to the other one, she asked, “What d’you think, guys? Is this it?”

“Pretty close, anyhow,” Richard said. “And it doesn’t look like too bad a hike, for all it’s uphill. I calculate thirty kilometers north should hit the lower rim. Even if I’m a little off, we should be able to see the thing from the crest of those northern hills. Damn crater’s supposed to be more than twenty kloms wide, after all. How about lunch, while I set up one more sun shot?”

“I’ve got fish,” Martha said, raising a string of silvery-brown shapes. “Richard’s excused for his navigating chores, and that leaves you two to dig the perishin’ bulrushes while Madame and I get these to grilling.”

“Right,” sighed Claude and Felice.

They made their fire in a well-shaded spot near the edge of a large grove, clear water came trickling down a limestone ledge to disappear into a muddy depression that swarmed with little yellow butterflies. After fifteen minutes or so, the delectable smell of roasting young salmon came wafting to the tuber grubbers.

“Come on, Claude,” Felice said, sloshing a net full of lumps up and down in the water to rinse them. “We’ve got enough of these things.”

The paleontologist stood quietly, up to his knees in the river among the tall stalks. “I thought I heard something. Probably beavers.”

They waded back to the bank where they had left their boots. Both pairs were still there, but something, or someone, had been messing about with them.

“Look here,” said Claude, studying the surrounding mud.

“Babyfootprints!” Felice exclaimed. “Screw me blind! Could there be Howlers or Firvulag in this country?”

They hurried back to the fire with the tubers. Madame used her farsensing metafunction to scan the area and professed to sense no exotic beings.

“It is doubtless some animal,” she said, “with prints that mimic those of children. A small bear, perhaps.”

“Bears were very rare during the early Pliocene,” Claude said. “More likely, ah, well. Whatever it is, it’s too small to do us any harm.”

Richard came back to the group and tucked map, note-plaque, and quadrant back into his pack. “We’re near as damn all,” he said. “If we really hump this afternoon, we might get there fairly early tomorrow.”

“Sit down and have some fish,” Martha said. “Doesn’t the aroma drive you wild? They say that salmon is just about the only fish that’s nutritionally complete enough to serve as a steady diet. Because it has fat as well as protein, you see.” She licked her lips, then gave a strangled squeak. “Don’t… turn… around.” Her eyes were wide. The rest of them were sitting on the side of the fire opposite her. “Right behind you there’s a wild rama.”

“No, Felice!” Claude hissed, as the athete’s muscles automatically tensed. “It’s harmless. Everybody turn very slowly.”

Martha said, “It’s carrying something.”

The little creature, its body covered with golden-tan fur, stood a short distance back among the trees, trembling noticeably but with an expression of what could only be called determination upon its face. It was about the size of a six-year-old child and had fully humanoid hands and feet. It carried two large warty fruits, greenish bronze streaked with dull orange. As the five travelers regarded it with astonishment, the ramapithecine stepped forward, placed the fruits on the ground, then drew back.

With infinite caution, Claude rose to his feet. The little ape backed up a few paces. Claude said softly, “Well, hullo there, Mrs Thing. We’re glad you could stop by for lunch. How’s the husband and kiddies? All well? A little hungry in this drought? I’m not surprised. Fruit is nice, but there’s nothing like a bit of protein and fat to keep body and soul together. And the mice and squirrels and locusts have mostly migrated into the upper valleys, haven’t they? Too bad you didn’t go along with them.”

He stooped and picked up the fruits. What were they? Melons? Some kind of papaya? He carried them back to the fire and took two of the larger salmon and wrapped them in an elephant-ear leaf. He put the fish down in the exact spot where the fruit had been and withdrew to his place by the fire.

The ramapithecus stared at the bundle. She reached out, touched a greasy fish-head, and put the finger into her mouth. Giving a low crooning call, she everted her upper lip.

Felice grinned back. She drew her dirk, hefted one of the fruits, and sliced it open. A mouth-watering sweet smell arose from the yellowish-pink flesh. Felice cut off a tiny slice and took a bite of it. “Yum!”

The rama clucked. She picked up the package of fish, everted her lips over her small teeth once again, and ran away into the trees.

Felice called out, “Give our regards to King Kong!”

“That was the damnedest thing,” Richard said. “Smart, aren’t they?”

“Our direct hominid ancestors.” Claude stirred up the tubers.

“We had them for servants in Finiah,” Martha said. “They were very gentle and cleanly little things. Timid, but they would work conscientiously at the tasks given them by torc wearers.”

“How were they cared for?” Claude asked, curious. “Like little people?”

“Not really.” Martha said. “They had a kind of barn adjacent to the house, where they lived in partitioned stalls, almost like the small cave rooms filled with straw. They were monogamous, you see, and each family had to have its own apartment. There were community areas, too, and dormitory nooks for the singletons. The childless adults worked for about twelve hours, then came home to eat and sleep. The mothers would care for their young for three years, and then put them in charge of ‘aunties’, old females who acted for all the world like schoolteachers. The aunties and other very old males and females played with the children and cared for them when the parents were absent. You could see that the parents were unhappy at having to leave the little ones, but the call of the torc couldn’t be denied. Still, the rama-keepers told me that the auntie system was a variant of one used by the creatures in the wild. It generally produced well-adjusted individuals. The Tanu have raised ramas in captivity for as long as they’ve lived on this planet.”

“Those sounds they make,” Claude said. “Could ordinary bare-necked people such as yourself communicate with them?”

Martha shook her head. “They answered to their names, and there were perhaps a dozen simple voice commands they’d respond to. But the principal means of communicating with them was through the torc. They could grasp very complex mental commands. And of course they were trained with the pleasure-pain circuitry so that they required little supervision for routine tasks such as housework.”

Madame shook her head slowly. “So close to humanity, and yet so far away from us. Their life span is only fourteen or fifteen years in captivity. Probably less in the wild. So fragile, so helpless-seeming! How did they ever survive the hyenas, the bear-dogs, the sabertooth cats, and other monsters?”

“Brains,” Richard said. “Look at that one who came to us. Her family won’t be hungry tonight. There’s natural selection working right in front of us. That little ape is a survivor.”

Felice looked at him with a wicked expression. “I thought I noticed a family resemblance… Here you go, Captain Blood. Have some of your great-great-et-cetera grandmother’s fruit for dessert.”

They left the Danube behind them and walked. It felt like the temperature was over forty in the September sun, but their adapted bodies could take it. Over the sunburnt grass, through thickets of brittle maquis, over boulders in the dry watercourses they walked. Richard had set their goal, the notch between two long hills that lay due north beyond slowly rising land with hardly a patch of shade and no water at all. They stripped to shorts, backpacks, and broad-brimmed hats. Madame passed a precious squeeze-bottle of sunburn cream. Richard led and Felice took the rear, the athlete ranging out tirelessly to be sure that no animal stalked them and to search, without luck, as it turned out, for some spring or other source of water. Between the two marched Claude and Madame, supporting Martha between them. The engineer became weaker as the hot hours of hiking accumulated; but she refused to let them slow down. None of them wanted to stop, in spite of the fact that there seemed to be nothing ahead of them but the dry stubbly upland reaching to the undulating horizon. Above it hung a pale-yellow, pitiless sky.

At last the sun dropped low and the sky turned to a light green. Madame called a halt near a rock-choked ravine where they could at least relieve themselves in privacy. Madame led Martha off and when the two returned, the old woman’s face was grim.

“She is hemorrhaging again,” she told Claude. “Shall we stop here? Or shall we make again a litter from one of the cots?”

They decided upon the lifter. While there was still daylight, they wanted to press on. Just a few kilometers farther and they would reach the brow of the hills.

They continued on as they had done earlier in the journey, one at each corner of the modified cot Martha lay with her lower lip clamped between her teeth, twin spots of bright rose on her pale cheeks the badges of her mortification. But she said nothing. The heavens turned to ultramarine and then to indigo, and the first stars appeared. However, they could still see well enough to walk and so they kept going, higher and higher, closer to the notch.

At last they were at the summit. The four of them set the litter down and helped Martha to her feet so that she could stand with them and look northward. About five kilometers away and just slightly below the pass where they rested was a long rampart. It reared up from the countryside behind the line of hills in a virtual jungle of spiny maquis scrub and curved away on both sides in a great arc that eventually melted into the northern horizon. The bare lip of the crater gleamed pale in the dusk.

Felice took Richard’s head between her hands and kissed his mouth, standing on tiptoe. “You did it! Right on the nose, buccaneer-baby, you did it!”

“Wen, I’ll be damned,” said the pirate.

“I don’t think so.” Claude’s broad Slavic face wore an exultant smile. “Oh, Madame. The Ship’s Grave!” Martha’s voice broke her eyes spilled tears. “And now, now…”

“Now we will make camp,” the Frenchwoman said practically. “We will rest well and recover our strength. For tomorrow, our work really begins.”

The skeleton had been laid out in state in the belly compartment of the fifth flyer that they inspected.

Unlike the other craft, which had had their hatches closed, the sepulchre of Lugonn was wide open to the elements. For long years the mammals, birds, and insects of the maquis had made free with it. Felice had, as always, been first up the boarding ladder of the exotic craft. Her cry of triumph at finally finding the remains of the Tanu hero was followed by a tortured howl that raised the neck hairs of the other four members of the expedition.

“He has no torc! No torc!”

“Angélique!” Claude shouted in alarm. “Reach out and stop her doing any harm in there!”

“No… torc!” A shriek of diabolic rage echoed within the flying machine and there was a thudding sound. As Richard and Claude clambered up the ladder, Madame Guderian stood beneath the shadow of the metal bird’s wings, eyes wide, mouth drawn into a strained grimace, both hands clenching the gold at her throat. It took every bit of her coercive metafunction to restrain Felice, to force the girl to back off from the instinctive urge to destroy the source of her frustration. Driven by furious disappointment, the athlete’s latencies trembled on the brink of operancy. The old woman felt her own ultrasenses being tested to the limit. She held, pressed the volcanic thing that writhed within her mind-grasp while at the same time her telepathic voice cried: Wait! Wait! We will all search! Wait!

Felice let go her opposition so abruptly that Madame Guderian staggered backward and collapsed into Martha’s frail arms.

“Okay!” Richard shouted from above. “I popped her one. She’s out cold!”

“But did she ruin anything?” Martha called, easing Madame to the dusty ground.

“Doesn’t look like it,” Richard replied “Get up here Marty, and have a look at this frigger yourself. Like something out of a goddam fairy tale.”

Felice lay in a heap on the far side of the flyer’s belly compartment, which measured about three by six. She had managed to seize Lugonn’s helmeted skull and dash it to the desk in a paroxysm of rage; but the interior of the ancient craft was so deep in dust, animal droppings, and other organic trash that the relic had come to no harm. Claude knelt down and restored the head to its place. Resting on his haunches, he studied the legend laid out before him.

Lugonn’s armor, heavily jeweled and filmed with gold, was now so dimmed and crusted that his bones could barely be discerned within the articulated plates and scales of glass. The crystalline helmet, crested with a peculiar heraldic animal, was a baroque and incredibly intricate piece of craftsmanship, so gorgeous, even coated with grime, that one forgot that it had a utilitarian purpose: to deflect photonic beams. Carefully, Claude raised the visor and unfastened the overlapping gorget plates and hinged cheekpieces. Lugonn’s skull was mutilated by a great wound, perfectly circular and a full twelve centimeters in diameter, which drilled through the naso-orbital region and obliterated the rear of the skull opposite the eyes.

“So that much of the tale was true,” the old man murmured.

He could not resist inspecting the skull for nonhuman attributes. Most of the differences were subtle; but the Tanu had possessed only thirty teeth and he had been notably longheaded as well as massively built. Aside from anomalies in the positions of some cranial sutures and the mental foramina, the Tanu skull seemed almost completely humanoid.

Richard stared about the compartment, noting the adobe wasp nests that crusted almost every surface, the shredded bulkhead insulation, the exposed ceram framework of once luxurious cabin appointments. There was even a beehive in one of the open forward lockers.

“Well, we don’t have a prayer of getting this sucker off the ground. We’ll have to go back to one of the others.”

Martha was digging in the mounds of rubbish on the left side of the skeleton in armor. She gave a satisfied cry. “Look here! Help me get it out of the garbage, Richard!”

“The Spear!” He helped her push away the moldy mess. In a few minutes the two of them had laid bare a slender instrument nearly a meter taller than the great skeleton, connected by a cable near the butt to a large jeweled box that had once been worn at Lugonn’s waist. The box straps had now disintegrated, but the glassy surface of the box and the Spear itself did not seem to be corroded.

Martha wiped hands on hips. “That’s it, all right. Zapper and powerpack. Careful of those studs there on the upper armrest, lovie. Even cruddled up as they are, they might still trigger the thing.”

“But how,” Claude marveled softly, “how did he ever pull the trigger on himself?”

“Oh, for chrissake,” said Richard. “Forget that and help us get the thing outside before our little butch Goldilocks wakes up and goes bonkers again.”

“I am awake,” Felice said. She massaged the point of her chin, where a bruise was forming. “I’m sorry about that. I won’t lose control again. And no hard feeling for the love-tap, Captain Blood.”

Madame Guderian came slowly up the boarding ladder. Her eyes rested briefly on the glass-armored skeleton and then passed to Felice. “Ah, ma petite. What are we going to do with you?” A sadness weighted her voice.

The girl got up and displayed a gamine grin. “I didn’t really spoil anything with my little temper fit. And I guarantee it won’t happen again. Let’s forget it.” She prowled about the flyer interior, kicking at the trash. “I expect the torc’s around here someplace. Maybe some critter carried it away from the skeleton and stashed it in another part of the ship.”

Claude took up the pack and started to descend the ladder while Richard and Martha followed with the still-tethered weapon, not wanting to risk disconnecting the cable.

Madame regarded the skeleton. “So here you lie, Shining Lugonn. Dead before the adventures of your exiled people had scarcely begun. Your tomb defiled by the little vermin of Earth, and now by us.” Shaking her head, she turned to descend the ladder. Felice sprang to the old woman’s assistance.

“I’ve a wonderful idea, Madame! I won’t be any use working on the aircraft or the Spear. So when I’m not needed for camp chores or hunting, I’ll come here and clean this place out, I’ll make it all neat again and polish his golden glass armor, and when we leave, we can close the hatch.”

“Yes.” Madame Guderian nodded. “It would be a fitting work.”

“I’d have to move all this rubbish anyway,” Felice added, “when I was looking for the torc. It must be here somewhere. No Tanu or Firvulag would have dared to take it. I know I’ll find it.”

Standing on the ground now, Madame looked up at Felice, so small, so winsome, so dangerous. “Perhaps you will. But if you don’t? What then?”

The girl was calm. “Why, then I’ll have to hold King Yeochee to his promise, that’s all.”

Richard said, “How about getting down here and giving us a hand, kid? You can moon around with your ancient astronaut all you want when we get a work camp set up. Come on, we’re going to move back to the last bird in line. See if you can carry this whole Spear rig by yourself, will you? She’s an awkward bitch for a two-man tote.”

Felice dropped lightly down from the belly hatch, hoisted the eighty-kilo powerpack in one arm, and stood while Claude and Richard balanced the long weapon on her opposite shoulder.

“I can manage,” she said. “But God knows how that old boy ever used this gadget in a running fight. He must have been quite a lad! Just wait till I find his torc.”

Claude and Madame looked at each other wordlessly for a moment, then helped Martha gather up their things. They began the half-kilometer trudge back along the crater lip to the Number Four Aircraft.

Madame said, “We have been fortunate, finding the Spear so readily. But there is another factor that may preclude an attack on Finiah this year.”

“And that is?” Claude inquired.

“The matter of who shall fly the ancient craft during the actual firefight.” She looked back over her shoulder at Richard, who was supporting Martha. “You will recall that he agreed merely to fly the machine back to the Vosges. If we must train another pilot for the battle…”

Martha had heard every word, of course. She turned to the ex-spacer with a stricken expression.

Richard gave a terse little bark of laughter. “Madame, you prove it again and again. You’re no mind reader. D’you really think I’d miss our little war?”

Martha clutched him tighter and whispered something to him. Madame said nothing, but as she turned away from them to resume the march along the rim trail, she smiled.

After a while, Richard said, “There’s something else we ought to think about, though. Wouldn’t it be best if we concentrate first on fixing up the flyer and hold off on the Spear until we get back home? Today is September twenty-second and the little King said that the Truce begins on October first. We’re cutting things damn short if the spooks are gonna need a week to mobilize. And what about getting your people ready, Madame? And working out the tactics for the iron weapons, if they got ’em? Seems to me, the faster we get outa here, the more time’ll be left for organizing. And back at your village, Martha can get proper medical care from Amerie. Maybe somebody like Khalid Khan could help out with the Spear repairs, too.”

It was Martha who demurred. “Don’t forget we’ve got to test the Spear. We must get it working, then install it in the aircraft somehow and try it out from the air. If this zapper is as powerful as I think it is, every Tanu with a microgram of farsense would be able to detect its atmospherics if we shot it off within a hundred kloms of the Vosges.”

“God, yes,” Richard said, crestfallen. “I forgot about that.”

Madame said, “We must do the best we can to put both flyer and Spear in working order before we leave this place. As for those back home, we will trust Peo to have everything in readiness. He knows every nuance of the plan against Finiah. If we have even one day remaining before the start of the Truce, we will still mount the attack.”

“Well, let’s get hopping then!” Felice said. She broke into a brisk trot, leaving the rest of them straggling far behind. They saw her wave at them briefly from the vicinity of the neighboring flyer, then vanish down the outside of the crater into the scrub. When they reached the great metal bird, they found the Spear placed carefully in the shadow of its wings. Beside it, scratched in the dust, was a message:

Gone hunting.

“For what?” Richard wondered cynically. Then he and Martha climbed up the ladder of the undisturbed aircraft, opened the simple hatch lock, and disappeared inside.

CHAPTER EIGHT

It took three days to get the flyer airborne.

Richard had known that these exotic craft were gravo-magnetic the moment he had looked inside the first specimen. The flight deck and passenger compartment of the thirty-meter bird had simple easy-seats, not acceleration couches. Ergo, “inertialess” drive, the universal propulsion system for aircraft and subluminal spaceships of the Galactic Milieu, which enabled almost instantaneous acceleration or deceleration in apparent defiance of gravity-inertia. The odds seemed good that the exotics had tapped the key forces of the universe in much the same “cablecar” fashion as the engineers of the Milieu. Richard and Martha had warily opened one of the sixteen power-modules of what they hoped was the flux-tap generator, using the flyer’s own tools. They found to their relief that the liquid within was water. No matter that the thingummies generating the rho-field reticula were concentric spheres within spheres instead of the stacked crystalline blades of the analogous Milieu device; the principle, and the basic operation, had to be the same. When the generator was fueled with good old aqua pura, this exotic bird would very likely go.

Claude rigged up a still and tended the ever-bubbling decamole pot while Richard and Martha traced the control circuitry and made sense of the quaint in-ship environmental system, which was capable of recharging itself once they got a little water into the powerplant. After one day of fiddling with the alien controls, Richard felt confident enough to carry on with the analysis alone, letting Martha transfer her efforts to the Spear. For safety’s sake, on the off chance that the flyer might blow during one of the groundside tests, they transferred the work camp to a shelf-like clearing in the maquis several kloms downslope from the aircraft, where a spring gushed through the crater wall.

On the evening of the third day, as they gathered around the campfire, Richard announced that the ancient machine was ready for its first flight test.

“I’ve scraped most of the lichen off and dug all the bird and bug nests out of the vents. She seems damn near good as new, for all her thousand years of squatting.”

“How about the controls?” Claude asked. “Are you sure you’ve figured them out?”

“I turned off all the audibles, of course, since they weren’t speaking my language. But the flight instrumentation is mostly graphic, so I can get by. Can’t read the altimeter, but there’s a terrain-clearance and position monitor that shows a nice picture, and eyeballs were made before digitals anyhow. Numeralwise, the engine cluster is hopeless. But each reader is equipped with three idiot lights, cyan, amber, and violet for go, watch-it, and bye-bye. So I should do all right there too. My big problem is going to be the wings. Putting wings on a gravo-mag aircraft is weird! They must be a cultural relic. Maybe these folks just enjoyed gliding!”

“Richard,” Martha said breathlessly. “Take me with you tomorrow.”

“Oh, Marty-babe…” he began.

Madame intervened. “You may not, Martha. There is a risk, even though Richard is confident.”

“She’s right,” he said, taking Martha’s hand. It was cold in spite of the warm evening. The firelight threw cruel shadows on the engineer’s sunken cheeks and eyes. “Once I’ve checked her out, then we’ll go for a spin. Promise. We can’t let anything happen to you, kid… Who’d put that damn zapper back together?”

Martha moved closer to Richard and stared into the fire. “I think the Spear will work. The powerpack shows half-charge, which is really remarkable, and none of the tiny little internal components of the lance unit seems to have been damaged. The main difficulties have been cleaning out the barrel and replacing the chewed-up cable. It was lucky that the flyer had some stuff that seemed compatible. I’ll need one more day to finish and reassemble, and then we can test it and begin practice.”

“How powerful do you think it will be?” Claude asked.

“There are several options, I believe,” the engineer said. “The lowest setting is the only one lacking a caplock, so they might have used that for their ritual fighting. I’d guess its power to be within light-pistol range. The four higher settings under the lock must have been for special purposes. At the top of the line, we could have us a portable photon cannon.”

Richard whistled.

“I don’t think we dare test it on max unless, we want to risk draining the powerpack,” Martha said.

“No chance of recharging?” asked Richard.

“I can’t get the pack open,” she admitted. “It takes a special tool and I was afraid to lark around with it. We’ll just have to save our big zap for the war.”

The gnarled branches of the maquis burned with a pungent resinous odor, snapping and throwing sparks that had to be smacked out. Only a few insects buzzed in the drought-stricken jungle. When it was full dark, the remaining birds and small mammals in the area would come to the spring to drink, and Felice and her bow would glean food for tomorrow.

The blonde athlete said, “I have Lugonn’s place nearly clean now. There’s no sign of the torc.”

Only Martha was able to voice a regret.

Richard said, “Should be plenty of the things lying around if we make good at Finiah. You won’t have to beg the little King for one. Just reach down on the battlefield and grab.”

“Yes,” sighed Felice.

“How have you planned to mount the Spear, Richard?” Claude asked. “I can’t see how we could rig up a pilot-operated trigger given the short time we have left.”

“There’s really only one way to handle it. I hover the aircraft and somebody else shoots the zapper out the open belly hatch. I suppose we could trust one of Chief Burke’s bully boys to…”

The old man said softly, “Every exopaleontologist knows how to handle big zappers. How do you think we cut the rocks to get the specimens out? I’ve carved up a few cliffs in my day, even moved a mountain now and then to get at some really choice fossils.”

Richard chortled. “I’ll be damned. Okay, you’re hired. We’ll be a two-man crew.”

“Three,” said Madame. “You will need me to provide a metapsychic screen for the flyer.”

“Angélique!” Claude protested.

“There is no helping it,” she said. “Velteyn and his Flying Hunt would see you hovering there.”

“You’re not going!” the old man stormed. “Not a chance! We’ll come over Finiah at high altitude, then drop down vertically and take ’em by surprise.”

“You won’t.” Madame was implacable. “They will detect you hovering. We can only hope to surprise them if I conceal the vessel metapsychically during its initial maneuvers. I must go. There is nothing more to be said.”

Claude got to his feet and stood hulking over her. “The hell there isn’t. Do you think I’d let you fly into the middle of a fire-fight? Richard and I have one chance in a hundred of getting out with whole skins. We’re going to need every gram of concentration to do the job and then get out. We can’t afford to be worrying about you.”

“Tchah! Worry about yourself. Radoteur! Who is the leader of this group? C’est moi! Whose plan is it, de toute façon, for the entire attack? Mine! I go!”

“I won’t let you, you stubborn old she-goat!”

“Try to stop me, senile Yankee-Polack viellard!”

“Shrew!”

“Salaud!”

“Ball-breaking old bat!”

“Espèce de con!”

“Shut the hell up!” thundered Felice. “The pair of you are as bad as Richard and Martha!”

The pirate grinned and Martha turned away, nibbling her lip to suppress laughter. Claude’s face blackened with embarrassed rage, and Madame was stunned out of her hauteur.

Richard said, “You two listen to me. The rho-field of the flux-tapper will prevent any of the Tanu Hunt from touching the aircraft. It’ll probably deflect lances and arrows and whatnot, too. So all we really have to worry about is mental attack. For countering that, our only hope is Madame’s metapsychic screen.”

“If I had a torc…” Felice muttered.

Richard asked Madame, “How long can you hold out against a bunch of ’em?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “We will be disguised as vapor until we direct the first blasts at the city wall. Then they will know an enemy is there, and many minds will be brought to bear upon my little screen. It is certain to be pierced. We can hope that this will happen after we strike at the mine. Once this is done, we can flee at top speed.”

“How fast can Velteyn’s outfit fly, anyhow?” Richard asked.

“Not much faster than a chaliko at full gallop. The mind of this Tanu champion is able to levitate his own steed and those of twenty-one warriors through PK, psychokinesis. There is only one other who is capable of such a feat and that is Nodonn, the Tanu Battlemaster and Lord of Goriah in Brittany. He can support fifty. There are others who can levitate themselves individually and a few who can carry one or two other persons. But none is strong enough to support many riders save these two.”

“If I had a torc!” Felice wailed. “Oh, wait! Just wait!”

“We’ll leave ’em in the dust,” Richard scoffed. “A couple of zaps to take out the wall on either end of the city, maybe one for the Tanu quarter to demoralize the opposition, then the big zorch for the mine. If that Spear really is a portable cannon, we can melt the place to a slag heap.”

“And come home safely ourselves,” Claude said, staring into the fire. “While our friends fight it out on the ground.”

“Velteyn will try to defend his realm,” Madame warned them. “He is exceptionally strong in creativity, and there are strong coercers in his company. We will be in great danger. Nevertheless, we will go. And we will succeed.” There was a loud snap and an ember flew through the air like a meteor, landing in front of the old woman. She got up and stamped upon it with great thoroughness. “I believe it is time for us to retire. We will want to get up early for Richard’s test flight.”

Martha rose from her place and said to Richard, “Come for a little walk with me before we settle down.”

“Conserve your strength, chérie,” Madame warned.

“We’ll just go a little way,” Richard said.

He slipped one arm around the engineer’s waist to steady her. They went out of the pool of firelight, leaving the others still talking, and walked to the far side of the camp clearing. Only stars illumined the tangle of maquis, for the new moon had gone down. Above them was the overgrown slope with its narrow trail leading to the crater rim. They could not see the refurbished flyer, but they knew it was up there waiting.

“We’ve been happy, Richard. Can you figure it? A pair like us.”

“Two of a kind, Marty. I love you, babe. I never thought it could happen.”

“All you needed was a good old-fashioned sexy girl.”

“Fool.” he said, and kissed her eyes and cold lips.

“When it’s all over, do you think we could come back?”

“Back?” he repeated stupidly.

“After the Finiah attack. You know we’re going to have to teach others how to fly the machine and maintain it so that they can carry out the other two phases of Madame’s plan. But you and I needn’t worry about those. Well have paid our dues. We can have them fly us back here, and then…”

She turned to him and he held her. Too frail and racked by cramps and hemorrhage to endure any further intercourse, she had still insisted upon consoling him. They spent every night in each other’s arms, sharing one of the decamole huts.

“Don’t worry, Marty. Amerie will know how to fix you up for good. We’ll come back here somehow and get a flyer just for ourselves and find us a good place to live. No more Tanu, no more Firvulag or Howlers, no more people at all. Just you and me. We’ll find a place. I promise.”

“I love you, Richard,” she said. “Whatever happens, we’ve had this.”

In the morning. Richard waved goodbye to the others and went up to where the bird stood. It still looked pretty scruffy in spite of the scraping, but he’d soon fix that.

He settled into the pilot’s seat and patted the console in the manner of an equestrian soothing a skittish mount “Oh, you beautiful, droop-snoot, swivel-winged thing. You wouldn’t badass the old Cap’n would you? Course not. We’re gonna fly today!”

He lit her up and went through the checklist. A familiar sweet hum of rho-field generators came to him there on the flight deck and he grinned at the thought of microscopic thermonuclear reactions hitting nicely on all sixteen, ready to weave a net of subtle forces that would free the metal bird from gravity’s domain. All of the engine idiot lights gleamed cyan-for-go. Keeping her firmly latched to Earth, he fed juice to the external web. The bird’s scabby skin glowed faintly purplish in the bright sunshine as the rho-field reticula clothed it lightly. All the crud that he’d been unable to remove sizzled away, leaving the surface a smooth cerametal black, just what you’d expect for an aircraft with orbiter capability.

He cut in the environmental system. Oh, yeah, little bluey-green lights telling him that no matter where the ship carried him, his life would be duty supported. Ease off on the field-web runup. Crank back the wings to minimum area until he got used to them. No use risking overcontrol on his maiden flight, wallowing all over the sky like a shot duck. Gotta do this with class, Cap’n Voorhees.

Okay… okay… and upsy daisy!

Straight up and dead level and hold at squiggle-hundred meters according to the readout on the indecipherable altimeter display. Call it 400. Down below, the Ries crater was a great blue cup with little spread-winged birds strung around its western lip, politely waiting for permission to drink. There were forty-two of them, with one missing where a section of the rim had collapsed in a landslide, and one empty slot for his own aircraft.

Damn those wings when the wind caught him at hover! He’d better move. Slowly… slowly… bank and zoom. Figure eight and vertical five and stop and start and swoop and glide and pendulum arc and, hot damn, he was doing it!

Down on the ground, four small figures were jumping up and down. He did a creditable imitation of a wing-waggle to let them know that he had seen them, then laughed out loud.

“And now, my friends, fare thee well, for I must leave you! We’ll save the touch-and-goes for later. Now the old Cap’n is gonna give himself a few lessons in how to drive this here flying machine!”

He slammed the rho-field into full inertialess web, stuck a burr under her tail, and took off vertically for the ionosphere.

CHAPTER NINE

Would volunteers come?

As the days of September dwindled and the preparations at Hidden Springs were completed, this question was paramount among the followers of Madame Guderian. Her influence, and indeed, the benefits of her Firvulag-Human Entente, did not extend much farther than the tiny settlements of the Vosges and the upper Saône wilderness, a region that would be able to muster not more than 100 fighters. Communication with other Lowlife enclaves was minimal because of the danger from Hunts, gray-torc patrols, Howlers, and even nominal subjects of King Yeochee who were reluctant to give up their human-harassing ways.

Before leaving High Vrazel, Madame and Chief Burke had discussed this problem with the shrewd old Battlemaster of the shape-changers, Pallol One-Eye. It had been agreed that the only hope for recruitment of more distant humans lay in the hands of the Firvulag. Only the illusion-spinners could hope to shepherd groups of Lowlife fighters from the far villages to Hidden Springs in time for the Finiah attack; but it was clearly going to take more than a simple call to arms to budge skeptical humans from their swamps or mountain fastnesses, especially if the invitation to the war was delivered by the little exotics.

Madame and Peo had recorded joint appeals on AV letter-plaques and left these with Pallol; however, the Firvulag messengers would have to establish credibility for the enterprise, and to this end a certain stratagem proposed by the Battle-master was ultimately agreed upon. At the same time that Madame’s expedition left High Vrazel for the Ship’s Grave, picked Firvulag teams, including King Yeochee’s most tactful Grand Combat referees, had set out on journeys to the south and west to summon all of the Lowlives in the known world to participate in the strike against Finiah.

The Little People went laden with gifts. And it happened that lonely huddles of cabins tucked away among the volcanoes of the Massif Central were visited at night by benevolent pixies. Bags of finely milled flour, flagons of honey and wine, luscious cheeses, candy, and other rare dainties appeared mysteriously on human doorsteps. Missing geese and sheep unaccountably found their way back to their pens; even lost children were guided home safely by butterflies or will-o’-the-wisps. On the mountain slopes of the Jura, a poorly tanned deerskin pegged to the wall of a Lowlife hovel might disappear, and in its place the delighted inhabitants would discover well-cobbled boots, fur jerkins, and butter-soft suede garments. Deep in the swamps of the Paris basin, the fen-dwellers would find that rotting punts were exchanged for new decamole dinghies stolen from Tanu caravans; great nets of waterfowl were left where outlaw human hunters could find them; plass containers of Survival Unit insect-repellent, more precious than rubies, appeared on the windowsills of the stilt-legged marshland houses where no passerby could possibly have reached. In scores of Lowlife settlements, humans were amazed when odd jobs were done by invisible helpers. Sick folks were nursed by elfin women who vanished with the dawn; broken things were mended; empty larders were filled; and always there were gifts, gifts, gifts.

Finally, when the Firvulag messengers ventured to appear en clair and present the awesome plan of Madame Guderian (who was, of course, known to all of the fugitives), the Lowlives were at least willing to listen. Fewer numbers agreed to respond to the appeal for fighting volunteers, for there were many emotional burn-outs and physical cripples among them, as well as a sizable percentage who cared only for their own skins. But the bolder, the healthier, and the more idealistic spirits were fired by the notion of striking a blow against the hated Tanu, while others agreed to participate in the attack when the subject of loot was delicately broached. So the Firvulag emissaries began to return, and those at Hidden Springs exulted because they brought with them a total of nearly 400 men and women recruited from places as far away as Bordeaux and Albion and the tidal estuaries of the Anversion Sea, These were welcomed in the name of Free Humanity, briefly trained, and equipped with weapons of bronze and vitredur. None of the newcomers, it had been agreed, would be told of the iron until the very day of the attack; and only the most competent of the volunteer fighters would be armed with the precious metal.

The secret staging area in the Rhineland bottoms opposite Finiah was in a state of full readiness by the middle of the last week in September. Lowlife warriors and a contingent of crack Firvulag stalwarts were poised to cross the river in sailing lighters belonging to the Little People. The boats would be disguised as blobs of mist for as long as the most powerful Tanu did not consciously seek to penetrate them. Another Firvulag force was concealed farther upstream in a second camp, primed to strike at the second break in the city wall, which was supposed to be made roughly opposite to the main thrust.

Tactics and targets had been decided upon and logistic preparations were complete. All-that remained was the arrival of the Spear of Lugonn.

“The Hunt flies tonight, Peopeo Moxmox Burke.” It was very dark in the cypress swamp, for the moon was down. Chief Burke focused his night ocular on the activity across the river. The high, narrow-necked peninsula upon which the Tanu city perched was, as always, ablaze with an incredible display of colored lights. The much sharper vision of Pallol One-Eye had already discerned what the Chief now viewed through his scope: a glowing procession rising from the topmost parapet of House Velteyn. It spiraled slowly toward the zenith, the figures of the Flying Hunt distinct even at a distance of two kilometers. Tanu riders whose faceted armor flashed every color of the rainbow mounted upward on great white chalikos. The legs of the steeds pumped in unison as they galloped into the airy darkness. There were twenty-one knights in the train and another who forged ahead to lead them, his billowing cloak streaming back like a comet tail of vaporous silver. From the distance came the faint notes of a horn.

“They’re turning south, Battlemaster,” said Burke.

Beside him, Pallol One-Eye nodded, he who had seen 600 winters upon his own far world and more than a thousand orbits of the nearly seasonless Pliocene Earth. He was taller than the Native American and nearly twice as massive, and he moved as fluidly as the black man-sized otters of the riverine jungle whose form, three times magnified, he often adopted. His right eye was a great orb of gold with an iris colored deep red; the left eye was hidden by a jeweled black leather patch. It was whispered that when he lifted that patch in battle, his glance was more deadly than a thunderbolt, which is to say that the destructive potential of his right-brain’s creativity was second to none among the Firvulag and the Tanu. But Pallol One-Eye was an irascible ancient now, and he had not deigned to soil his obsidian armor at a Grand Combat for more than twenty years, unable to bear his people’s annual humiliation. He had found Madame Guderian’s plan against Finiah to be mildly amusing, and he had acquiesced in a Firvulag role when both Yeochee and the young champion, Sharn-Mes, decided to support the Lowlives. Pallol declared that he would lend the effort his good advice, and he had done so; but it was unthinkable that he should participate personally in what he termed “Madame’s little war.” More likely than not, the assault would be indefinitely postponed when the lady failed to return with the vital materiel. And even if she did bring back the Spear, how could mere humans hope to wield it effectively against the bravos of Velteyn? It was a weapon for a hero! And it was all too true that heroes were in short supply among this effete younger generation.

“Now they’re crossing the Rhine, heading west into the Belfort Gap,” Burke said. “No doubt planning to convoy the last caravan from Castle Gateway before the Truce.”

Still Pallol only nodded.

“The Tanu can’t have any inkling of our preparations, Battlemaster. We’ve carried it off without a flaw.”

This time Pallol laughed, a grating sound like the chafing of lava blocks. “Finiah shines bright across the river, Leader of Humans. Save your self-congratulation for its snuffing. Madame Guderian will not return and all of this scheming against the torc-wearing Foe will be for nothing.”

“Perhaps so, Battlemaster. But even if we don’t fight, we’ve accomplished things that we never dared dream of before. Nearly five hundred Lowlives have been brought together in a common cause. Only a month ago, that would have been an idle fancy. We were scattered and afraid, mostly without hope. But not any more. We know that there is a chance that we can break the Tanu domination of humanity. If you Firvulag help us, we can do it sooner. But even if you break off the alliance, even if Madame fails to bring back the Spear this year, we’ll return to fight again. After this, humans will never go back to the old timid ways. Others of us will go searching for the Ship’s Grave if Madame fails. We’ll find that ancient weapon and make it work again, something your people could never do. And if the Spear is gone, if we never find it, we’ll use other weapons until the Tanu slavers are defeated.”

“You mean you will use the blood-metal,” said Pallol.

Chief Burke was silent for a dozen seconds. “You know about the iron.”

“The senses of the torc-wearers may be so puny that they require machines to sniff the deadly metal out, but not those of the Firvulag! Your camp reeks of iron.”

“We will not use it against our friends. Unless you plan betrayal, you have nothing to fear. The Firvulag are our allies, our brothers-in-arms.”

“The Tanu Foe are our true brothers and yet we are fated to contend with them eternally. Could it be otherwise between Firvulag and humanity? This Earth is destined to belong to you, and you know it. I do not believe that humanity will be satisfied in allowing us to share. You will never call us brothers. You will call us interlopers and try to destroy us.”

“I can speak only for myself,” Burke said, “since my tribe, the Wallawalla, becomes extinct upon my death. But there will be no treachery by human against friendly Firvulag as long as I am the general of the Lowlives, Pallol One-Eye. I swear it on my blood — which is as red as your own. As for our never being brothers… this is a matter I’m still pondering. There are many different degrees of kinship.”

“So thought our Ship,” sighed the old champion. “It brought us here.” He tilted his huge head toward the sky. “But why? With so many other yellow stars in the universe, so many possible planets, why here, with you? The Ship was instructed to find the best.”

“Perhaps,” said Peopeo Moxmox Burke, “the Ship took a longer view than you.”

All day long the birds of prey had circled.

They rode thermals above the Vosges woodland in a neat stack, holding most of the time at altitudes appropriate to their species. Lowest was a wheeling flock of small swallow-tailed kites; above them soared a mated pair of bronze buzzards; the fire-backed eagles came next, and then a lone lammergeier vulture, mightiest of the bone crackers. Most lofty of all the circling birds was the one that had initiated the daylong vigil and attracted all of the others. On motionless wings, it orbited at a height so remote that it was barely visible to watchers on the ground.

Sister Amerie watched the birds through the sparse branches of a stone pine, her tawny cat resting in her arms. “ ‘Wherever the body is, there will the eagles be gathered together.’ ”

“You quote the Christian scriptures,” said Old Man Kawai, who was shading his eyes with a tremulous hand. “Do you think the birds are truly clairvoyant? Or do they only hope, as we do? It is late, so late!”

“Calm yourself, Kawai-san. If they get here tonight, there’ll be a whole twenty-four-hour day for the Firvulag to join in the assault. That should be enough. Even if our allies withdraw at sunrise day after tomorrow, we can still win with the help of the iron.”

The ancient continued to fret “What can be keeping Madame? It was such a slim hope. And such hard work we have done here in expectation that the hope would be fulfilled!”

Amerie stroked the cat. “If they arrive before dawn tomorrow, the attack can still proceed according to the second alternative.”

“Ifthey arrive. Have you considered the navigation problem? Richard must come first to Hidden Springs. But how will he find it? Surely these tiny mountain valleys must look much alike from the air, and ours is hidden because of the Hunt. Richard will not be able to distinguish our canyon, even in daylight, if he approaches at a high altitude. And he does not dare to fly a low-level search, lest the enemy observe him.”

Amerie was patient. “Madame will conceal the ship mentally, of course. Calm yourself. This constant worry is bad for your health. Here, pet the cat. It’s very soothing. When you stroke the fur, you generate negative ions.”

“Ahsodesuka?”

“We can hope that the flyer would be equipped with an infrared scanner for night flight, just as our eggs of the twenty-second century were. Even with all of our fighters gone, there are still more than thirty warm bodies here in Hidden Springs. Richard will sniff us out.”

Old Man Kawai sucked in his breath. A horrible thought of a new sort crossed his mind. “The metapsychic concealment of the aircraft! If its volume is more than about ten cubic meters, Madame will be unable to render it invisible! She will only be able to disguise it somehow and hope that the Tanu do not concentrate their perceptive powers too closely upon it. What if the machine is so large that her faculties are insufficient to invest it with a plausible illusion?”

“She’ll think of something.”

“It is a great danger,” he moaned. The little cat gave him a long-suffering glance as his hand essayed a few nervous pats. “The Flying Hunt could even discover the aircraft while it rests here! All that is needed is for Velteyn to descend for a close look at my poor camouflage nets. They are pathetic things.”

“Adequate for night concealment. Velteyn has no infrared, thank God. And he almost never comes this far west nowadays. Stop your fussing! You’ll stew yourself into cardiac arrest. Where’s your jiriki?”

“I am a foolish, useless old man. I would not be here in the first place if I were able to rule myself through Zen… The nets, if they fail their purpose, the fault will be my own! The dishonor!”

Amerie gave an exasperated sigh. She thrust the cat at Kawai “Take Deej into Madame’s cottage and give her some leftover fish. Then hold her on your lap and close your eyes and pet her and think of an those lovely Tri-D’s that used to come rolling off your assembly lines in Osaka.”

The old man giggled. “A substitute for counting sheep? Yatte mimasu! It may serve to tranquilize me, at that. As you say, there is still time to mount the attack… Come, kitty. You will share your valued negative ions with me.”

He pottered off, but turned after a few steps to say with a sly grin, “However, one incongruity remains. Forgive my flaunting of the obsolete technology, Amerie-san, but even the lowliest electronicist knows that it is quite impossible for negative ions to be cat-ions!”

“You get out of here, Old Man!”

Tittering, he disappeared into the cottage.

Amerie walked down the canyon past the huts and cottages, nodding and waving to the few people who, like herself, could not resist watching the sky while they waited and prayed. The last of the able-bodied men and women had marched off under Uwe’s command three days ago, and the deadline for the optimal two-day assault had come and gone. But there was still time to execute the one-day attack. At dawn tomorrow, it could be that human beings would unite together for the first time on this Exile world to challenge their oppressors.

Oh, Lord, let it happen. Let Madame and the rest of them get here in time!

It was getting cooler as the sun descended, and soon the thermals, those buoyant upwellings of heated air, would fade away completely and the soaring raptors would have to come back to earth. Amerie came to her secret place beneath a low but open-armed juniper and lay down, face to the sky, to pray. It had been such a wonderful month! Her arm had healed quickly and the people… ah. Lord, what a fool she had been to think of becoming a hermit. Hidden Springs folk and the other Lowlife outlaws of the region had needed her as a physician and counselor and friend. Among them she had done the work she had been trained for. And what had become of the burntout case with the self-punishing compulsion to flee into a haven of solitary penitence? Here she could even pray her Divine Office, contemplate in the forest stillness; but when the people needed her, she was there ready to help. And they were there to help. And he was there in the midst of them. It was her dream fulfilled, even in its changing, only now the language that she prayed in was a living one.

The lammergeier flew away to his lair among the high crags and the eagles descended to their roosting trees an hour before the sun set. The kites scattered, having to satisfy their appetites with insects, and even the buzzards disappeared at last, perhaps wondering what had prompted all of them to waste time waiting in the futile hope of sharing the great newcomer’s prey. He alone still circled aloof in the high air, completely disdainful of the vanished thermals.

And Amerie watched him, lying under the tree, watched that distant speck endlessly wheeling that had drawn all the others and then disappointed them. That bird with motionless wings.

Heart pounding, she scrambled to her feet and ran back up the canyon to rout everybody out.

“Stand back! Don’t touch it until the field’s off, for God’s sake!” someone shouted.

The huge thing, still glowing faintly purple, seemed to fill the whole lower end of the canyon. It had descended just as soon as the sky was fully dark, subsonic by a whisker but still shoving a hurricane blast ahead of it that tore bundles of thatch from the roofs and sent poor old Peppino’s geese tumbling like leaves in a gale. It had come to a dead halt no more than two meters above the highest trees, its drooping nose, gull wings, and fan-shaped tail bathed in a crawling network of nearly ultravisible fire. Old Man Kawai, composed now and curtly efficient, had sent several youngsters for wet sacks and ordered the rest of the villagers to stand by the rolls of camouflage netting.

They all watched, awe-struck, as the hovering thing folded its great wings back against its thirty-meter fuselage and delicately felt its way down. It nosed obliquely between a pair of tall firs where there was a minimum of undergrowth, hesitated just barely off the ground, and then let its long legs settle. There was a loud hiss; a few bushes began to smolder and wisps of smoke curled up around the footpads. The skin of the bird went dead black.

Then the people, who had stood as though paralyzed, broke into wild cheers. A number sobbed aloud as they rushed to follow Kawai’s orders, beating out the little fires that had been set by the rho-field and hustling to set up poles and guy-ropes for the nets.

The belly hatch opened and the ladder extruded. Slowly, Madame Guderian came down.

Amerie said, “Welcome home.”

“We have brought it,” said Madame.

“Everything is ready. Exactly as your plan specified.”

Lame Miz Cheryl-Ann, who was two hundred and three and nearly blind, seized one of Madame’s hands and kissed it; but the Frenchwoman hardly seemed to notice. Up above, a word of warning came from within the flyer. A litter was lowered from the hatch by Felice and Richard.

Madame said only, “You are needed, ma Soeur.” And then she turned and walked as in a daze toward her cottage. Amerie knelt down and took one of Martha’s bony wrists. Richard stood there in his ruffled pirate shirt and battered buckskins with fists clenched and tears running down his dirty sun-scorched cheeks.

“She wouldn’t let us come back until the Spear was working right. And now she’s damn near bled to death. Help her, Amerie.”

“Follow me,” said the nun, and they rushed off after Madame, carrying the litter with them, leaving Claude to see that the big black bird of prey was safely bedded down for the night.

CHAPTER TEN

Before dawn there was the Battle Mass, and then Madame exerted her farspeech power to transmit an enigmatic “we come” to Pallol, insuring that the invasion fleet would be poised to exploit the bombardment of Finiah’s wall. Sunrise was less than an hour away and if past performance was any criterion, Lord Velteyn and the members of his Flying Hunt would be back at their stronghold after the night’s foray.

Claude strode along nearly at the end of the procession heading for the flyer and wished Felice would shut up. She was once again attired in her black leather ring-hockey armor, which had been beautifully refurbished by Old Man Kawai’s artisans, and she was wild with anxiety lest she should miss the war.

“I wouldn’t take up any room. And I swear I won’t say a word during the flight! Claude, you’ve got to let me come with you. I can’t wait for you to come back after the strike. What if you don’t make it?”

“If Velteyn nails the flyer, you’d go down with us.”

“But if you get away, you could put me down right outside Finiah! Say, at the breach in the wall on the land side of the peninsula. I could go in with the Firvulag on the second wave! Please Claude!”

“The Hunt could have spotted us by then. Landing could be suicide, and that’s not what this fight is all about. Not for me and Madame Guderian, at any rate. Finiah is just the beginning of our war. And Richard’s got Martha to live for now.”

Up ahead, villagers were pulling the nets from the black bird. A few candles gleamed in the mist where Amerie was blessing the aircraft.

Felice said, “I could help you with the Spear, Claude. You know what an awkward big bastard it is. I could be useful.” She clutched at the old man’s bush shirt and he stopped abruptly and took her by, the shoulders.

“Listen to me, girl! Richard is all strung up. He hasn’t slept for more than twenty-four hours and he’s half-crazy with worry because of Martha, Even with the transfusions, Amerie gives her less than a fifty-fifty chance. And now Richard has to fly a combat mission in an exotic aircraft with a couple of old crocks and the future of Pliocene humanity riding on his tail! You know how he feels about you. Having you in the flyer during the mission could be the last straw. You say that you’d keep out of the way. But I know you couldn’t help asserting yourself once the heat was on. So you’re staying here, and that’s that. We’ll do our job and then run for home, and with luck we’ll leave Velteyn completely mystified about where we’ve gone. We’ll come back and pick you up. I promise you that if we make it, we’ll get you to the battle not more than an hour or so after the main assault begins.”

“Claude… Claude…” Her face peered through the T-shaped opening in the black hoplite helmet, panic and fury and some other more alien emotion at war with reason. Claude waited, praying that she wouldn’t jump him. But he was so steeped in fatigue that he almost didn’t give a damn whether or not she knocked him cold and forced the others to let her take his place. It was in her mind, all right; but she also knew that he was by far the better shot.

“Oh, Claude.” The blazing brown eyes closed. Tears poured behind the cheekpieces of her helmet and the green plumes flattened as she wrenched away from him and fled back toward Madame’s cottage.

He let out a long breath. “Be ready when we get back!” he called, and then hurried to where the others were waiting.

The great bird crept furtively from its hiding place. When it was in the clear, it mounted the predawn sky like a violet spark going up an invisible chimney, attaining an altitude of 5000 meters in a thunderclap inertialess surge. Angélique Guderian stood beside Richard, clutching the back of his seat with one hand and her golden torc with the other. Richard had changed into his old spacer’s coverall.

“You got us hidden, Madame?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied faintly. She had said hardly a word since their safe return.

“Claude! You ready?”

“Whenever you give the word, son.”

“We’re on our way!”

A split second later, the belly hatch rolled smoothly back. They hovered motionless above a patch of microscopic jewels, shaped roughly like a tadpole with its tail joined to the eastern bank of the Rhine.

“Why, it’s on the Kaiserstuhl,” Claude said to himself.

The patch grew, spread, its star-cluster blur clarifying into twinkling lights as the flyer dropped, subsonically this time, and stopped dead in the air about 200 meters above the highest eminence of the Tanu city.

“Give it to ’em,” said Richard.

Claude horsed the great Spear into position and took a bead on the line of fiery dots marking the Rhineside wall. Somewhere in the graying mists of the river waited a flotilla of Firvulag boats loaded with human and exotic troops.

Keep her depressed, old man! You don’t want to boil your own folks out of the water!

He raised the caplock and swung it aside. There, right there. Touch the second stud.

A thin bar of green-white lanced without sound.

Down below, a tiny orange flower bloomed, but the line of dots atop the wall remained unbroken.

“Shit!” Richard exclaimed. “You missed! Elevate!”

Calmly, Claude took aim once again, pressed the stud. This time there was no burst of orange fire, only a dull-red glow. Perhaps a dozen of the rampart lamps were swallowed by it.

“Hee-yow! Gotcha!” screeched the pirate. “Make a one-eighty, Claudsie-boy! Ready for the back door!”

The flyer spun on its vertical axis and Claude found himself aiming at a point near the base of the shining tadpole’s tail. He fired and missed… high. He fired and missed again… low.

“Jesus, hurry it up!” urged Richard.

The third time, the blast struck the wall squarely, melting it at a point where the causeway of the peninsular neck met the extinct volcanic mass of the Kaiserstuhl proper.

Madame moaned. Claude felt dragon talons grip his guts.

“Are they coming?” Richard demanded. “Hang on, Madame! Sweet Christ, Claude, get on with ft! Never mind zapping the Tanu buildings. Go for the mine!”

The old man wrestled the Spear around, a sudden bunt of sweat greasing his hands and making them slip on the weapon’s glassy butt. His tensed-up muscles trembled as he tried to bring the weapon to bear upon the small blue constellation that marked the mine workings. He could not depress the Spear sufficiently to bring the target into range. “Quick, Richard! Take her a couple of hundred meters south!”

“Aye,” growled the pirate. The flyer changed position in the twinkling of an eye. “That better?”

“Wait… yes! I’ve just about got her. Have to do this right the first time. Only have one blast at full zap…”

“Merde alors.” Madame whispered.

The old woman staggered away from Richard to crash against the right bulkheads. Fists pressed to her temples, she began to scream. Claude had never heard such a sound from a human throat, such a distillation of anguish, horror, and despair.

At the same moment, something flashed past the flight deck port. It glowed neon-red and was shaped like a mounted knight.

“Oh, God,” said Richard flatly. Madame’s screams cut off and she fell senseless to the deck.

“How many?” asked Claude. He tried to get a grip on himself, tried to steady the heavy Spear on target, prayed that his damned old body wouldn’t betray him at this last extremity. They had almost done it! Almost…

“I make it twenty-two.” Richard’s calm voice seemed to come from a considerable distance. “The whole Round Table circling us like Sioux around a wagon train. All scarlet except the leader, and I’d put his spectral class somewhere in the BO range, look out!”

One of the figures, the blue-white one, soared down and took a position immediately below the flyer. He drew his glassy sword and thrust it upward. Three Roman-candle globes of ball lightning left the tip and soared rather slowly toward the open belly hatch. Claude dodged, pulling the Spear out of the way, and the things flew into the aircraft, where they began caroming off the panels and decking, hissing and emitting a fearful smell of ozone.

“Shoot!” shrieked Richard. “For God’s sake, shoot!”

Claude took one deep breath. He said, “Steady, son,” and aimed, depressing the fifth stud of the Spear of Lugonn just as the little blue lights centered themselves in the weapon’s sight.

An emerald bar jabbed once at the spangled earth. Where it struck, the rock went white, yellow, orange, roiling crimson like a flame-armed starfish. Claude fell sideways and the Spear clanged to the deck. The belly hatch started to close.

Lightning balls bounced and crackled. The old man felt one of them strike him in the back, rolling up his spine from buttocks to the base of his neck, burning all the way. The interior of the flyer was filled with smoke and a smell of burnt flesh and fabric. There were sounds, too, Claude discovered, as he studied the scene from afar, a sizzle as the remaining two energy balls sought their targets, curses and then a thin scream from Richard, a whimpering sob from Angélique as she tried to creep toward him over the smeared deck, someone breathing in and out in harsh, rhythmic persistence.

“Get it away from me!” a frantic voice cried. “I can’t see to land! Ah, dammit, no!”

A jarring crash and a slow tilt to one side. Claude felt a breeze (amazing the way it seared his back) and the hatch opened. A peculiarly angled surface of grassy ground, gray and dim in the first light of morning. Richard sobbing and cursing. Angélique making no sound. Voices shouting. Heads poking up through the hatch, again at that odd angle. Wails from that silly youngster. Old Man Kawai. Amerie’s familiar tones: “Go easy. Go easy.” Felice spitting obscenities when somebody said she was going to get her armor all messed up.

“Put himover my shoulder. I can carry him. Stop your wiggling, Claude. Silly old fart! Now I’m going to have to walk all the way to the war.”

He laughed. Poor Felice. And then his face was upside down among her green skirts and he was jouncing up and down and he screamed. But after a little bit the movement stopped, and they laid him on his stomach and something touched his temple, making the pain and the rest of it grow muzzy.

He said. “Angélique? Richard?”

Unseen, Amerie replied, “They’ll recover. You all will. You did it, Claude. Sleep now.” Well, how about that? And for a moment he saw the fiery starfish again, but with crimson and gold limbs expanding, branching out among the hapless helpless firefly patterns of Finiah streets in the instant before the hatch of the flyer slammed shut. How about that… and if the lava kept oozing out of the old Kaiserstuhl volcano for even a little while, it was going to be a long time before they mined any more barium in the regions around there.

“Don’t worry about it, Claude,” Felice said.

And so he stopped.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Half-dozing in the dead hour before dawn, Moe Marshak and the other human troops on duty in Finiah had mistaken the first blast of the photon weapon for a lightning stroke. The thin green beam had lanced out of the stars, barely missing the Rhineside wall that the gray-torc garrison manned and demolishing an adjacent mess hall inside the compound. Marshak was still gaping at the flames consuming the wreckage when Claude’s second shot struck the Number Ten bastion squarely, breaching the fortification not a dozen meters from Marshak’s station. Great blocks of granite flew in all directions and the air boiled with smoke and dust. Oil tubs that held the watch fires spilled in the concussion and sent blazing rivulets racing down the cracked walkway.

When Marshak was able to get a grip on himself, he rushed to look through one of the embrasures. There in the fog-blurred waters below were the boats.

“Alert!” he shouted aloud; and then his mind sent the alarm on the declamatory mode, amplified by his gray torc.

Manhak: Invasion viaRhine! Wallbreach StationTen!

Captal Wag: Howthehellmany be there Moe? Howmany boats?

Manhak: Wholefuckin’ river FULL!! Eightyhundred who can count damnfog bastards everywhere Firvulagboats but letmesee yes! LOWLIVES TOO! Repeat Lowlives + Foe invading. Landings! Rocks swarming damnfuckers penetrating breach estimate hole maybeninemeters max.

Comet Formby: All troopsofwatch to StationTen. General alert RhineGarrison to arms. Dutyobservers scan/report Defensiveunits to wallstations… CANCELCANCELCANCEL! Defensiveunits to garrisoncompound! Invader penetration compound!

Commander Seaborg: Lord Velteyn. Alert. Firvulag and human invasion force has penetrated the city fortifications at breached Number Ten Station. Countering.

Lord Velteyn of Finiah: Kinfolk arise and defend! Flyers to saddle! Na bardito! Na bardito taynel o pogekdne!

Chief Burke and Uwe Guldenzopf led the mob of Vosges Lowlives and outland volunteers up the steep rampart and across the tumbled nibble of the breakthrough. Vitredur arrows and crossbow bolts rained down from the battlements, but until the defenders could redeploy at ground level, the invaders would have a brief advantage. As bad luck would have it, the breach was within the grounds of the principal Finiah garrison. In addition to the confusion caused by the mess hall conflagration, which was spreading to adjoining structures, a chaliko stable had been broken open by falling debris and numbers of the great animals were loose.

Three soldiers ran from the guardhouse at the compound gate. “Take ’em,” yelled Burke, and howling desperados fell upon the little force and cut it to pieces. “Out of here! Into the city streets! and get this gate off the hinges!”

Troops were pouring from the barracks, some with their armor only half strapped on. Free-for-all clashes erupted everywhere in the murk as invaders scrambled through the broken wall while the human minions of the Tanu strove to press them back. The irregulars trying to unhinge the gates were attacked and overwhelmed, and soldiers swung the heavy metal grille shut, locking it.

“We’re sealed in!” Chief Burke jumped on top of an overturned feed wagon. His face and upper torso were painted in the old war patterns and he had the wing feather of a fire-eagle thrust into his knotted, iron-colored hair. “Hit the sonnofabitches! Get that gate back open! This way!”

He saw Uwe fall beneath a sword-wielding gray-torc and leaped down, brandishing the wide tomahawk Khalid Khan had forged for him. The blade sank into the soldier’s crested bronze kettle-helmet as though it were made of pasteboard. Burke hauled the body off to find Ouldenzopf lying flat on his back, one hand clutching his breast and an expression of agony on his bearded face.

Burke knelt. “Did he nail you, bubi?”

Struggling up on one elbow, Uwe groped inside his buckskin shirt. Bone-colored bits gleamed in the lurid light “Only my second-best meerschaum, dammit.”

The Lowlives remained hemmed in, unable to break out of the area in the immediate vicinity of the garrison complex. Those crowded in the breach were pressed both by the defenders and by their own comrades coming up from the beachhead. A wall of panic arose. Some invaders fell and were trampled. A garrison officer wearing a silver torc and full blue-glass body armor directed a unit of halberdiers that advanced upon the stalled irregulars. Sweeping crystal blades mowed down the packed, shrieking throng.

And then the monsters came to the rescue.

High on the steep slope of rubble shone the wavering nightmare shape of a three-meter albino scorpion, the illusionary aspect of Sharn the younger, general of the Firvulag. From the minds of the exotics came a mighty wave of terror and dread that overloaded the telepathic circuits of the gray torcs and sent their wearers writhing into madness. Sharn himself could smite the enemy at a range of nearly twenty-five meters; others of his advancing company might not have auras so formidable, but woe to the Foe who fell into their clutches!

Hideous trolls, spectres, manticores, shambling dark presences seized the soldiers in spine-crunching embraces, sank fangs into unarmored throats, even rent men limb from limb. Some of the exotics were capable of flinging bolts of psycho-energy that broiled troops in their bronze cuirasses like lobsters in the shell. Other Firvulag harassed with sheets of astral fire, streams of nauseating ichor, or brain-crippling illusions. The great hero Nukalavee the Skinless, wearing his aspect of a flayed centaur with blazing eyes, howled until enemy soldiers fell writhing to the ground, eardrums split and minds reduced to near-idiocy. Another champion, Bles Four-Fang, invaded the headquarters of the garrison, caught up the silver commander named Seaborg, and appeared to devour him, armor and all, while the dying officer calmly broadcast final telepathic orders to his subordinates directing the troops now making a last stand at the gate opening into the inner city. Seaborg’s aides blunted their vitredur weapons against Bles’s scaly illusory hide, only to be eaten alive in turn for their temerity. By the time the monster had downed the last adjutant, the headquarters building was afire and the invasion force swarmed in Finiah’s streets. So Bles withdrew in good order, picking his teeth with a silver spur. His appetite had only been whetted, and the morning was young.

Vanda-Jo was still overseeing the last wave of volunteers embarking from the staging area when Lord Velteyn and the Flying Hunt took to the air. Shouts of fear came from the crowd as they saw the glowing knights mount up from the city across the water. One man yelled, “The bleeders’re coming for us!” and jumped into the Rhine. A fiasco was averted when Vanda-Jo tongue-lashed the outlanders for their cowardice, pointing out that the Hunt was circling high above Finiah, bent on some more urgent objective.

“So into the boats and quit farting around!” she bellowed. “You don’t have to be afraid of Velteyn and his flying circus any more! Did you forget our secret weapon? We’ve got iron! You can kill Tanu now, even easier than you can kill those traitor human torcers that do their dirty work!”

Eyeballs rolled anxiously in the half-light. The Firvulag skipper in the two-masted shallop nearest Vanda-Jo glowered in dwarfish impatience. “Hurry it up, spiritless earthworms, or we’ll sail to the war without you!”

Suddenly a column of emerald light stabbed down from apparently empty sky in the axis of the wheeling Hunt, striking a low knoll within the city across the Rhine. Orange-and-white fire fountained up at the point of impact, and seconds later, the sound of a rolling detonation sped over the river.

“The mine!” somebody shouted. “The barium mine’s blowing up too, it looks like a volcano erupting in there!”

As if the bombardment had been a signal, another gout of flame belched up from the farthest reaches of Finiah, back where the peninsula narrowed to a small neck connecting the city to the mainland.

“See that?” Vanda-Jo was exultant “The second wave of spooks have landed opposite our main beachhead! That female Firvulag general named Ayfa is attacking from the Black Forest side. Now will you shitheads get a move on?”

The men and women on the dock hoisted their iron-tipped spears into the air and yelled. They pounded down the spindly gangplanks into the waiting boats so eagerly that the small craft rocked and nearly swamped.

On the other side of the Rhine, flames made a scarlet track on the dark water. The faerie lamps of blue and green and silver and gold that had outlined the splendid Tanu City of Lights began to wink out.

Velteyn, Lord of Finiah, pulled up the reins of his chaliko and hung in midair, shining like a magnesium flare. The nobles of his Flying Hunt, eighteen male and three female knights, all glowing red, drew in their mounts to surround him. His thought-thrust was nearly incoherent with frustration and rage:

Gone! The flying machine is gone… and yet my lightnings surely penetrated its belly. Kamilda! Send your farsense seeking it.

…It recedes from us Exalted Lord. Ah Tana at a speed unprecedented! It drops behind the brow of the Vosges and beyond my perception. My Lord if I ascend to a great height…

Stay Kamilda! More urgent threats confront us below. Look all of you! Look what the Foe has done! O the shame the pain the havoc! Down to the ground all of you. Each to command a mounted party of chivalry in defense of our City of Lights!

Na bardito taynel o pogekône!

The fighting moved steadily inland from the Rhineside break. Two hours after dawn, the western front was strung through the gardens of the pleasure dome, on the very outskirts of the Tanu quarter.

Moe Marshak had reloaded his quiver several times from those of fallen comrades. He had wrenched the gaudy crest from his bronze helmet early on and then rolled in filth to camouflage the shine of his cuirass. Unlike certain of his luckless fellows, he had deduced quickly that the Firvulag would be able to detect telepathic communication, and so he made no attempt to contact his officers for orders. Maintaining a quiet mind, he went his lone way, keeping out of monster range as he skulked Finiah’s byways, potting Lowlives with cool economy while dodging hysterical ramas and noncombatants. Marshak had already taken out at least fifteen of the enemy, plus two bareneck civilians he had caught looting a gray-torc of its weaponry.

Now Marshak slipped into the long porch that formed the perimeter of the pleasure dome. Hearing one of the distinctive Lowlife yodels, he concealed himself behind thick ornamental shrubs and nocked one of the serrated war arrows in his compound bow.

In the next instant an unexpected diversion came from within the building. The stained glass from a pair of French doors perhaps five meters away from the soldier shivered to atoms from the impact of some heavy object. There were screams and a rumbling sound. Long hands all adorned with rings fumbled with the jammed catch. Other hands shook the bent framework. The angle was such that Marshak could not clearly see the people trapped inside, but their cries of terror and dismay reached both his mind and ears, as did the uncanny warbling of the thing pursuing them.

“Help! The door’s struck! And it’s coming!”

Help us! Helphelphelp us! HELP US!

The blanket coercive summons of a Tanu overlord clutched at Marshak’s consciousness. His gray torc compelled obedience. Forsaking his hiding place, he ran to the door. On the other side, pressed against the mangled copper fretwork, were three female denizens of the pleasure dome and their tall Tanu client, whose handsome violet and gold robes proclaimed him an official of the Farsensor Guild. He presumably lacked the coercive or psychokinetic potential to fend off the apparition that was now poised in an inner doorway, ready to strike.

The Firvulag wore the appearance of a gigantic hellgrammite, a larval water insect with clashing razor-sharp mandibles. The brute’s head was nearly a meter wide, while the long segmented body, slick with some stinking secretion, seemed to fill the corridor behind it.

“Tana be thanked!” cried the Tanu. “Quickly, my man! Aim for its neck!”

Marshak raised his bow, shifted position to avoid the struggling women, and let fly. The glass-tipped shaft sank for most of its length between chitinous plates behind the creature’s scissoring jaws. Marshak heard the Firvulag utter a telepathic bellow. Without hurrying he drew two more arrows and sent them into the hellgrammite’s glittering orange eyes. The insectile form wavered, became insubstantial… and then the awful thing was gone and a dwarf in black obsidian armor lay dead on the floor, throat and eyesockets transfixed.

The soldier used his vitredur short sword to pry open the ruined latch. Pleasure surges engendered by the grateful exotic throbbed along his pelvic nerves in the sweet, familiar reward. When the nobleman and his disheveled companions were freed, Marshak saluted, right fist pressed against his heart.

“I am at your service, Exalted Lord.”

But the farsensor dithered. “Where are we to go? The route to House Velteyn is cut off!” His abstracted expression showed that he was scanning about with his mind’s eye.

“Well, we can’t go back inside,” said the most petite of the pleasure dome inmates, a black woman of exquisite contours and sharp voice. “The damn muffers are crawling out of the woodwork!”

“Oh, Lord Kolitcyr,” squealed a teary blond. “Save us!”

“Silence!” commanded the Tanu. “I’m attempting to, but no one will respond to my summons!”

The third woman, thin and empty-eyed, her provocative attire half torn from her bony shoulders, sank down on the pavement and began to laugh.

Kolitcyr gasped. “The dome is surrounded! I call, but Lord Velteyn’s knights are in the thick of battle!… Hah! The invaders cringe and retreat before the coercive might of Tanu chivalry! The Goddess be thanked, there are many more powerful than I!”

A great jarring thump came from inside the pleasure dome. Distant cries became louder. More glass broke and a rhythmic pounding began.

“They’re coming! The monsters are coming!” Once again, the blonde burst into hysterical tears.

“Soldier, you must lead us…” The Tanu scowled, shook his head as if to clear it. “Lead us to the Northern Watergate! There may be a boat…”

But it was too late. Across the garden, trampling flowerbeds and hurtling through the bushes came a force of twenty-odd Lowlife humans led by a half-naked red man of heroic stature.

Marshak’s hand poised above his quiver, frozen. Most of the invaders had compound bows as good as his own held at the ready.

“Surrender!” shouted Peopeo Moxmox Burke. “Amnesty for all humans who yield freely to us!”

“Stand back!” cried the Tanu farsensor. “I, I will burn out your minds! Strike you mad!”

Chief Burke smiled, and his painted face, framed in straggling gray hair, was more menacing than the Firvulag phantasm had ever been. The exotic man knew that his bluff was useless, just as he knew there would be no amnesty for those of his race.

Commanding Marshak to defend to the death, Koliteyr tried to flee. The iron tomahawk spun and split the exotic’s skull before he had taken two steps.

Marshak relaxed. He let the bow and arrow fall to the flagstones and watched the approaching Lowlives in numb silence.

The strategic importance of the barium mine had been made clear to Sharn-Mes at the Lowlife briefing session prior to the invasion. Humiliation of the hated Foe, the Firvulag general was made to understand, must take second place to the complete destruction of the mine and its trained personnel. It was vital to Madame Guderian’s grand design that the supply of the precious element, indispensable in the manufacture of torcs, be cut off. Shortly before noon, when Sharn was taking a breather with Bles and Nukalavee in a makeshift command post well supplied with liberated beer, a Firvulag scout arrived with important news. The Mighty Ayfa and her Warrior Ogresses had made a successful thrust from the eastern breach and now invested the sector around the mine workings. They had ascertained that molten rock, triggered by Claude’s blast from the Spear, had plugged the mine entrance, buried the main refinery and the complex that housed the human and rama workers, and flowed some distance into the streets of the upper city before congealing. However, the mine administration building with its store of purified barium stood firm. The place was completely surrounded by black and steaming lava, now sheathed in a clinkery skin of cooled rock except where cracks revealed the red glowing interior. There were still Tanu engineers in the building, and among them a creator of the first rank. Ayfa and her force had gleaned this intelligence when an unexpected bolt of psychoenergy zapped one of the investigating ogresses to a cinder, narrowly missing the Dreadful Skathe. She of the snaggleteeth and dripping talons had spun a psychic shield over the survivors that sufficed for a disorderly retreat out of mindbolt range.

“And so the Mighty Ayfa,” the scout concluded, “now awaits your suggestions, Great Captain.”

Bles uttered a hoarse bleat of ironic laughter. He tipped half a barrelful of beer into his maw. “Ahh, let’s go help the poor little ladies save their honor.”

“Honor, my left testicle!” hissed Nukalavee. “If the Foe-man’s creative force strained the defenses of Skathe, then he is a worthy antagonist to any of us at a distance. We would expend our mind-power simply in the erection of screens and have little left for offense.”

“Even the approach is fraught with danger,” Sharn noted. “The crust of cooling lava, as this scout says, is fragile and may crack under the weight of a stalwart. You know our minds cannot penetrate dense rock deeply enough to strengthen the crust. And to fan through into the magma below is certain doom.” He addressed himself to the dwarf messenger. “Pliktharn, how broad is the expense of lava that would have to be crossed?”

“At least fivescore giant steps, Great Captain.” Pliktharn’s face became eager. “The crust would bear my weight easily!”

“You could send me and Nukalavee to mind-guard him, along with Ayfa and Skathe,” Bles suggested. “The four of us working together have the range.”

“And what happens when our brave gnomish brother reaches the mine building?” Nukalavee sneered. “How will he attack the Foe through our own mental screens? Four-Fang, you’ve worn that reptile suit so long that your wits are shrinking to fit your illusory brainpan!”

“The Great Captain Ayfa,” cautioned the scout, “has perceived that the Tanu engineers are calling upon Lord Velteyn for help.”

Sharn smacked a great hand onto the table. “Te’s tonsils! And when he responds, he’ll airlift them out, barium and all! We can’t take that chance. I hate like hell to resort to Lowlife tactics, but there’s only one way to handle this.”

“Easy does it, lads!” Ayfa called out “Don’t lose your nerve now that you’re almost there.”

Homi, the Little Singhalese iron-smelter, clutched Pliktharn’s neck tighter. The lava crust bent as the Firvulag approached the lee of the mine building. There the flow was thicker and had held heat longer, which meant that the skin of cooled rock might crack and let them fall through to the magma at any moment.

About the incongruous pick-a-back figures shone a radiant hemisphere, the mental screen conjured by the joint power of Ayfa, Skathe, Bles, and Nukalavee. The four heroes, and most of the force of Warrior Ogresses, were concealed behind the sturdy walls of burnt-out townhouses, well back from the edge of the lava flow and a full 200 meters from the mine headquarters. Energy bolts flung by the trapped Tanu creator blazed from an upper-storey window, disintegrating into a web of lightnings as they were neutralized by the screen’s potential. At length, Pliktharn and Homi reached a lower window and climbed inside. Ayfa, who was strong in the farsensing talent, observed what happened next.

“The three Foemen descend to the lower chamber, armed with vitredur geology picks! One of them has considerable coercive power. He’s trying to force Pliktharn to lower the screen, but that won’t work, of course. The mindbolt flinger now gathers his strength for one mighty thrust at point-blank range! He uses steady pressure rather than abrupt projection. Our screen wavers! It goes spectral, into the blue! The yellow! It will surely fail! But now the Lowlife has his arbalest ready and aims at the creator. Ah! The missile of blood-metal passes through our weakening shield as through a curtain of rain! The Foeman falls! A second shot, and a third, and all of the Foe are downed!”

The four heroes leapt and the Warrior Ogresses whooped with joy in the triumph. All of their minds, even at the great distance, felt the death-flare of first one Tanu mind, then a second.

But the mindbolt flinger was strong even in the dying. Amplified, agonized, his thought thundered in the aether.

The Goddess will avenge us. Accursed through the world’s age be those who resort to the blood-metal. A bloody tide will overwhelm them.

An instant later, his soul flickered out.

The Lowlife named Homi, having retrieved the three iron quarrels for reuse in his crossbow, appeared at the window and waved. Then he and Pliktharn set to work chipping and prying at the heavy milestone windowsill until its mortar gave way. The stone smashed the thin lava crust beneath the window, sending up a gush of smoke and flame. Before the fresh rift could heal, the human and the Firvulag were seen to toss certain small containers into the pit of molten rock, after which they climbed out a different window and made their way carefully back the way they had come.

A young girl clad in shiny black jogged in apparent tirelessness along the narrow Vosges jungle trail. Shadows grew deeper and a cool wind swept from the heights into the ravine that the footpath followed. Treefrogs were beginning their evening songs. Before long, the predators would awaken. After nightfall, there would be so many hostile creatures on the prowl that Felice would be unable to fend them off with her coercive power. She would be forced to bivouac and wait until dawn.

“And I’ll be too late! The Truce starts at sunup and the war in Finiah will be over! “How far had she come? Perhaps two-thirds of the 106 kilometers that lay between Hidden Springs and the western bank of the Rhine? She had lost so much time this morning before getting started, and the sun went down at eighteen hundred hours…

“Damn Richard. I damn him for getting hurt!”

She should have insisted on going with them in the flyer. She could have done something. Helped old Claude steady the Spear. Assisted Madame’s mental defense. Even deflected the globe of ball lightning that had blinded Richard in one eye and caused him to crash the flyer.

“Damn him! Damn him! The Firvulag will quit fighting when the Truce begins and our people will have to withdraw. Ill be too late to get my golden torc! Too late!”

She splashed heedlessly across a small stream. Ravens, disturbed in their feeding upon some otter’s leftovers, rose squawking into the vine-hung forest canopy. A hyena mocked her, its mad laugh echoing from the ravine wall.

Too late.

The glass carnyx of a fighting Tanu woman sounded the charge. Armored chalikos, bearing knights who coruscated each in a different jewel-color, galloped down the corpse-strewn boulevard toward the barricade where the contingent of Lowlives was making its stand.

“Na bardito! Na bardito!”

There were no Firvulag allies at hand to dampen the mental assault. Images of brain-searing intensity whipped and stabbed at the humans. The night was fraught with unspeakable menace and pain. Plunging exotics in their sparkling harness seemed to be coming from all directions, gorgeous and invulnerable. The humans loosed iron-tipped arrows, but skillful psychokinetics among the Tanu turned most of the fusillade aside, while the rest clattered harmlessly against the plates of the glass armor.

“The spooks! Where are the spooks?” howled a despairing Lowlife. A moment later one of the knights crashed upon him, impaling his claw-torn body with a sapphire lance.

Of the sixty-three human beings who had made their stand in that street, only five escaped into the narrow alleys where hanging awnings, lines of washing, and crowded ranks of rubbish carts abandoned by panicked rama sanitary workers made it impossible for the mounted Tanu to follow.

A mammoth bonfire was ablaze in the Central Plaza of Finiah. Jubilant phantoms in a hundred hideous guises capered around it waving battle standards festooned with strings of freshly psychogilded skulls.

Khalid Khan protested. “They’re wasting time, Mighty Sharn! Our people are taking a terrible beating when they meet the Tanu unsupported by Firvulag mind-cover Even the mounted gray-torcs can cut right through our infantry. We’ve got to work together! And we must find some way to counter those chaliko-riders.”

The great luminous scorpion bent over the turbaned Pakistani, multicolored organs within its translucent body throbbing to the rhythm of the exotic war chant.

“It has been many years since we had cause for celebration.” The unhuman voice clanged in Khalid’s brain. “For too long the Foe has lurked safely behind stout city walls, despising us. You do not understand how it has been with us, the humiliation our race has suffered, draining our valor and driving even the most powerful of us to hopeless inaction. But behold! Look upon the trophy skulls, and these only a small proportion of the total!

“And how many of them belong to Tanu? Dammit, Sharn, most of the enemy casualties have been among the torced and bareneck humans! The noncombatant Tanu are all holed up in House Velteyn where we can’t reach them, and only a handful of their mounted knights have been killed!”

“The Tanu chivalry”, the eerie voice hesitated and then made reluctant admission, “presents a formidable challenge to us. Armored war steeds with their minds held in thrall by the riders are not intimidated by our horrific illusions or shape-shifting. We must contend against them physically, and not all of the Firvulag company are of heroic frame. Our obsidian weapons, our swords, halberds, chain-flails, and throwing spears, are not often effective against chaliko cavalry in the Grand Combat. And the same obtains in this battle.”

“You need a change in tactics. There are ways for foot soldiers to put down charging horsemen.” The metalsmith’s teeth glittered in a brief grin. “My ancestors, Pathan hillmen, knew how!”

The response of the Firvulag general was cool. “Our battle customs are fixed by sacred tradition.”

“No wonder you’re losers! The Tanu weren’t afraid to innovate, to take advantage of human science. Now you Firvulag have human allies on your side, and you stick one timid little toe into the battlefield and then mess about singing and dancing instead of going for the prize!”

“Beware lest I punish your insolence, Lowlife!” But the furious retort lacked conviction.

Khalid said softly, “Would you help us if we try a new tactic? Would you shield our minds while we try to knock those long-shanked bastards out of the saddle?”

“Yes… we would do that.”

“Then pay close attention.”

The monster scorpion metamorphosed into a handsome young ogre wearing a thoughtful scowl. After a few minutes the hobgoblins left off their madcap dancing, changed into gnomish warriors, and crowded in to listen.

Converting Sharn’s lieutenants proved to be more difficult. Khalid had to engineer a demonstration. He rounded up ten volunteer Lowlives equipped with iron-tipped javelins and led them to the approaches of House Velteyn, where gray-torc and Tanu riders guarded the ultimate sanctuary. The paved avenue-was lit by widely spaced torchères. No other invaders were to be seen because of the heavy concentration of defenders. Sharn and six of his Great Ones lurked in the shelter of a deserted mansion while Khalid deliberately led his squad of spearmen into plain sight of a patrolling gray troop.

The human leader, fully armored in blue glass, drew his vitredur blade and led a charge at the gallop down the cobblestone street. Instead of scattering, the Lowlives drew closely together, forming a tight phalanx bristling with four-meter spears.

The patrol swerved to the right at the last instant to avoid crashing into the iron porcupine, individual troopers reining up and wheeling their mounts about so that they could strike with longsword or battleaxe. They were plainly nonplussed, since almost all of the antagonists they had encountered thus far had emulated the Firvulag maneuver of tossing their pole-arms and then fleeing. This pack of innovators stood their ground until the animals were off balance in the turn, then stabbed deep into the unarmored bellies of the huge clawed beasts.

The hideous pain of disembowelment overrode the mind-control exerted by each rider upon his mount. Wounded chalikos stumbled and fell, or went careening off in a frenzy while the troopers hung on for their lives. Khalid’s warriors pounced upon the unhorsed, dispatching them with spear or blade. Five minutes after the initiation of the attack, every member of the gray troop was either dead or had fled.

“But will it work on the Foe?” inquired Betularn of the White Hand skeptically. With Pallol Battlemaster a non-participant, he was the doyen of Firvulag stalwarts, and his opinion counted for much.

Khalid grinned at the beetle-browed giant while one of his comrades tried to staunch bleeding arm and leg wounds with torn strips of the dead captal’s cloak. “It will work on the Tanu, providing we take them by surprise. We must assemble as many Lowlives and Firvulag as possible for a massed thrust against House Velteyn. Those of our people who don’t have spears will improvise them from bamboo awning poles. We needn’t use iron to gut the chalikos, but each human fighter will have to have an iron weapon to use against downed Tanu riders. And your people will have to be right in the thick of things beside ours, handling mind-defense and getting in whatever licks they can.”

The venerable warrior shook his head slowly. He said to Sharn, “This is contrary to our Way, as you know, Great Captain. But the Foe has defied tradition for more than forty years.” The other five Great Ones growled assent. “We have prayed to the Goddess for a chance to recoup our honor. And so I say… let us essay the Lowlife tactic. And her will be done.”

Long after midnight, with smoke from the burning city blotting out the stars and the untended torchères guttering low, Lowlives and Little People gathered for the grand assault. In a rare display of cooperative virtuosity, the best of the Firvulag illusion-spinners wove a curtain of confusion to deceive the farsensing Foe. The Tanu besieged within House Velteyn knew that the enemy was up to something, but the nature of the assault remained in doubt.

The Lord of Finiah himself, aloft once again with several of his most trusted tacticians, made pass after pass at low altitude, atempting to discern the plan of the invaders; but the meta-psychic shimmer was just dense enough to defeat his farsight. He beheld the Foe massed opposite the main portal of his palace. There were to be no feints, no multipronged storming of the several entrances, that much was self-evident. With typical Firvulag singlemindedness, Sharn seemed to be gambling everything on a last great frontal assault.

Velteyn sent the telepathic order on the intimate mode to each knight commander, and these in turn transmitted the Lord’s words to their subordinates:

“To the forecourt! Let all the noble Tanu battle company, all of our adopted kinfolk of the gold and silver torc, all loyal and valiant gray soldiery attend! The Foemen gather for their final push. Let us destroy them body and soul! Na bardito! Forward, fighters of the Many-Colored Land!”

All aglow and exalted with battle ardor, the Tanu chivalry charged in a mass against the indistinct, dense groups of advancing Foe. The screen of confusion snaped off in the last second before contact to reveal the deadly pincushions of spears, many of them iron. With mental weapons all but neutralized by the Firvulag, the Tanu unshipped their pennoned lances and sent their mounts caracoling about the flanks of the hedgehog formations, alert for the expected rain of flung spears. And thus the treacherous novelty caught them completely unawares.

Velteyn, from his vantage point in the sky, could only far-watch aghast in those early minutes of slaughter. Then he dove his mount down, bombarding the enemy with all the psycho-energy he could muster. His mind and voice rallied the shattered ranks.

“Abandon your animals! Let all fight afoot! Creators and psychokinetics, raise shields for your fellows! Coercers, compel all grays and silvers to stand fast. Beware the blood-metal!”

The vast courtyard and immediate palace grounds were now a surging mass of bodies. Dull-red flashes signaled Firvulag and Tanu mind-screens interfacing in mutual collapse, after which the antagonists might fight hand to hand, with perfidious Lowlives attacking with the iron at every opportunity. The merest prick from the blood-metal meant death to a Tanu. Human gold-torcs, of course, could be wounded by the blood-metal, but not mortally poisoned. Velteyn’s heart warmed at the bravery shown by the gold adoptees, many of whom seized iron weapons and turned them against the Firvulag.

Unfortunately, it was otherwise with the grays and silvers. The discipline of the torc faded in the face of diminished coercion from beleagured Tanu overlords. The lower echelons among the human levies were unmanned by the demoralizing sight of Tanu knights falling to the iron. Both Firvulag and Lowlives seized the advantage and decimated the ranks of the terror-stricken troops.

For three hours, Velteyn hovered above the battlefield, invisible except to his own forces, directing the ultimate defense of his City of Lights. If they could only hold out until dawn, until the start of the Truce! But as the sky beyond the Black Forest massif paled, two powerful bodies of the Foe, spearheaded by Bles Four-Fang and Nukalavee, made a great press and reached the palace gate.

“Fall back!” Velteyn cried. “Stand and defend the portal!”

The jewel-armored knights did their utmost, wreaking a fearful toll of dwarfs and humanity as they laid about with their glowing two-handed swords. Sooner or later, however, an iron dart would find a chink of vulnerability at groin or armpit or the back of a knee, and another brave warior would attain Tana’s peace.

Velteyn groaned aloud, overwhelmed by sorrow and rage. The doors of his palace were giving way. There was no course left but the evacuation of the noncombatants via the roof with the help of the sad-eyed little human PK adept, Sullivan-Tonn. By Tana’s grace, the two of them might save most of the nearly 700 trapped Tanu civilians while the knights staved off the invading horde in the stronghold corridors. If only he could die with them! But that release was forbidden to the humiliated Lord of Finiah. He was going to live on, and he was going to have to explain all of this to the King.

Peopeo Moxmox Burke slumped against the roof parapet of House Velteyn, letting fatigue and reaction sweep over him. Gert and Hansi and a few other Lowlives beat the bushes of the roof garden and searched the ornate penthouse for hidden Tanu. But they found only the discarded baggage the fugitives had left behind, spilled pouches of jewelry, heavy embroidered cloaks and fantastic headgear, broken flagons of perfume, a single ruby-glass gauntlet

“No sign of ’em, Chief,” Hansi said. “Ganz ausgeflogen. They’ve flown the coop.”

“Get back downstairs, then,” Burke ordered. “See that all the rooms are checked out, and the dungeons, too. If you see Uwe or Black Denny, send them to me. We’ll have to coordinate the looting.”

“Check, Chief.” The men clattered away down the broad marble stairway. Burke raised one leg of his buckskin trousers and kneaded puckered flesh around the healing scar. With the anesthetic of battle fury worn off, it hurt like hell; and there was a long cut on his bare back and about forty-seven bruises and abrasions that were also making themselves known But he was in pretty good shape, for all that. The rest of the Lowlife army should be so lucky.

One of the fleeing evacuees had left behind a basket with wine and breadrolls. Sighing, the Chief began to eat and drink. In the streets below, Firvulag were gathering their wounded and their dead and forming long processions on their way to the Rhine watergates. Bobbing lanterns out on the river marked the position of small boats that had already begun the withdrawal in anticipation of the dawn. Here and there among the burning ruins stubborn human loyalists continued a futile resistance. Madame Guderian had warned Burke that the humans living in Finiah might prove less than grateful for their liberation. She had been right, as usual. There were interesting times ahead, damn it.

Sighing once again, he finished the wine, gave his stiffening muscles a stretch, then took up a discarded Tanu shawl to wipe off his war paint.

Moe Marshak shuffled a few steps forward in line.

“Quit crowding, big boy,” snarled the lovely dark-skinned woman from the pleasure dome. The other two inmates had not worn gray torcs and were long gone, led away to the sailing lighters that shuttled back and forth between Finiah and the Vosges shore. The promise of amnesty was being kept by the Lowlives. But if you were a human torc wearer, there was a catch.

Marshak knew all about the activity of the drumhead tribunal, of course. He was in telepathic communion with all of the grays within his range who had not deliberately shut him out, as the black woman had. The Tanu, givers of delight and power, were gone. As they had wafted away to the east, they had reached out in poignant farewell, caressing and commiserating and sending a final warm surge flooding the neural networks of those who had been faithful, so that the gray-torc prisoners had an illusion of celebration in place of grief and despair. Even now, at the end, they could comfort one another. The kinship remained. None of them was alone, except by choice.

The black woman stood before the judges, her eyes bright. When the question came, she almost screamed her reply: “Yes! Yes, by God! Do it! Give me back my self again!”

Lowlifeguards led her through a door to the right of the tribunal. The rest of the grays, mourning the sister’s defection but respecting her choice, reached out one last time. She defied them all, placed her head on the block. The great mallet smote the iron chisel and there was overpowering pain. And silence.

Now Marshak’s turn came. As a man dreaming, he told the Lowlife judges his name, his former occupation in the Milieu, the date of his passage through the time-portal. The oldest of the judges pronounced the formula.

“Moe Marshak, as a wearer of the gray torc, you have been held in bondage by an exotic race and compelled to abet the enslavement of humanity. Your Tanu overlords have been defeated by the Alliance of Freeliving Humans and Firvulag. As a prisoner of war, you are entitled to amnesty, provided that you agree to the removal of the torc. If you do not agree, you will be executed. Please make your choice.”

He chose.

Every nerve in his body seemed to ignite. Kindred minds sang as they gave consolation. Steadfast, he reaffirmed the unity and a great rejoicing flare obliterated all other sensation: the sight of the hollow-eyed judges, the pressure of hands that gripped and dragged him away, the penetration of his heart by the long blade, and the final cold embrace of the River Rhine.

Richard stood in the dim little log chapel in Hidden Springs village where they had laid Martha out, seeing her in a swimming reddish haze even though Amerie had tried to reassure him that his right eye was virtually undamaged.

He wasn’t angry. Disappointed, that was all, because Marty had promised to wait. Hadn’t they planned it all together? Hadn’t they loved each other? It wasn’t like her to let him down after all they’d been through together.

Well, he would work something out.

Wincing a little from the bandaged burns, he gathered her into his arms. So light, so white. All gowned in white. He almost fell as he pushed the door open. No depth perception with only one eye. “Doesn’t matter,” he told her. “I can wear a patch like a real pirate. Just you hang on.”

He went lurching toward the place where the flyer stood, covered by camouflage netting, one landing strut broken and one wing partly crushed by his prang-in. But a gravo-mag ship didn’t need wings to fly. It was still in good enough shape to take both of them where they wanted to go.

Amerie spotted him just as he was lifting Martha inside. She came running, her nun’s veil and robes billowing. “Richard! Stop!”

Oh, no you don’t, he thought. I did what I promised. Now it’s you guys who owe me.

With the flyer tilted, it was tricky to maneuver Martha. He made her comfortable and tossed the Spear out, powerpack and all. Maybe some wisehead would figure out how to recharge it some day. Then Madame Guderian could get another flyer and go zap all the rest of the Tanu cities and make Pliocene Earth safe for good old humanity.

“Just don’t call me to drive the bus,” he muttered. “I’ve got other plans.”

“Richard!” the nun shouted again.

He waved to her from the flight deck port and sat down in the charred seat close hatch. Light up. Juice to the external web. Camouflage netting burning away. Oh-oh, Environmental system in the amber. Shorted by the lightning, maybe. Well… it would last long enough.

The soothing hum filled his brain as he brought the ship up level. He glanced back at Marty to be sure that she was still safe. Her form wavered, seemed to go red. But in a moment it was all right, and he told her, “I’ll take us up nice and slow. We’ve got all the time in the world.”

Amerie watched the broken-winged bird rise vertically into the golden morning sky, following the first component of the sign she traced. The mist was gone now and it was going to be a beautiful day. Over in the east the smoke cloud was thickening but upper-level winds carried it in the opposite direction.

The aircraft ascended until it was a mere speck. Amerie blinked, and the speck became invisible against the bright vault of the heavens.