Starships were a new thing on Skaith. Only in the last dozen years had they arrived, a shattering astonishment out of the sky.
Before that, for its billions of years of existence, the system of the ginger star had lived solitary in the far reaches of the galaxy, untouched by the interstellar civilization that spread across half the Milky Way from its center at Pax, chief world of Vega. The Galactic Union had even embraced the distant little world of Sol. But the Orion Spur, of which Skaith and her primary were citizens, had remained largely unexplored.
In her young days, Skaith was rich, industrialized, urbanized and fruitful. But she never achieved space-flight; and when the ginger star grew weak with age and the long dying began, there was no escape for her people. They suffered and died, or if they were strong enough, they suffered and survived.
Gradually, out of the terrible upheavals of the Wandering, a new social system arose.
The consul of the Galactic Union, who spent a few brief hopeful years at Skeg, wrote in his report:
The Lords Protector, reputed to be "undying and unchanging," were apparently established long ago by the then ruling powers as a sort of super benevolence. The Great Migrations were beginning, the civilizations of the north were breaking up as the people moved away from the increasing cold, and there was certain to be a time of chaos with various groups competing for new lands. Then and later, when some stability was reestablished, the Lords Protector were to prevent a too great trampling of the weak by the strong. Their law was simple: Succor the weak, feed the hungry, shelter the homeless—striving always toward the greatest good of the greatest number.
It appears that through the centuries this law has been carried far beyond its original intent. The Farers and the many smaller nonproductive fragments of this thoroughly fragmented culture are now the greater number, with the result that the Wandsmen, in the name of the Lords Protector, hold a third or more of the population in virtual slavery, to supply the rest.
A slavery from which there was no escape, until the Starships came.
Skaith was starved for metals, and the ships could bring those, trading iron and lead and copper for drugs with fantastic properties that were grown in Skaith's narrow tropic zone and for antiquities looted from the ruins of old cities. So the Wandsmen let them stay, and Skeg became a marketplace for the off-worlders.
But the ships brought with them more than iron pigs. They brought hope. And that hope was a corrupting influence.
It led some folk to think of freedom.
The people of Irnan, a city-state in the north temperate zone, had thought of freedom so strongly that they asked the Galactic Union, through its consul, to help them emigrate to a better world. And that precipitated the crisis. The Wandsmen reacted furiously to dam this first small trickle, which they foresaw would turn into a flood as other city-states saw the possibilities of escape. They took Ashton, who had come out from Pax as representative of the Ministry of Planetary Affairs to confer with the Irnanese, and sent him north to the Citadel for the Lords Protector to question and deal with. With his ready-made mob of Farers, Gelmar, Chief Wandsman of Skeg, shut down the GU consulate and made Skeg a closed enclave which no foreigner might leave. Other Wandsmen, under Mordach, punished the Irnanese, making them prisoners in their own city. And when Stark came to find Ashton, the Wandsmen were waiting for him.
Gerrith, wise woman of Irnan, had prophesied that a Dark Man would come from the stars. A wolf's-head, a landless man, a man without a tribe. He would destroy the Citadel and the Lords Protector for the sake of Ashton.
For that prophecy the wise woman died, and Stark came very near to dying. He fitted the description. A mercenary, he owned no master. A wanderer of the space-roads, he had no land of his own. Orphaned on an alien world, he had no people. Gelmar and his Farers had done their best to kill him at Skeg before he could begin his search. Word of the prophecy had been carried far and wide among the scattered peoples of Skaith. It had dogged Stark all the way north, so that he was alternately considered a savior to be worshipped and encumbered, a blasphemy to be destroyed out of hand and an article of value to be sold to the highest bidder. The prophecy had not in any way helped him.
Nevertheless, he had managed to do what the prophecy had said he would do. He had taken the Citadel and gutted it with fire. Because of the Northhounds and their inbred loyalty, he had not been able to kill the Lords Protector. But they would be destroyed in another sense when it became known to the people that they were not at all supernatural beings, undying and unchanging, but only seven Wandsmen who had achieved the positions of supreme authority for ordering the affairs of the Fertile Belt—seven old men cast out now upon the world by no greater power than that of an off-planet adventurer.
So far, so good. But the wise woman had not said what would follow the fulfillment of her prophecy.
Of the six who had left Irnan to find the Citadel, only three survived: Stark himself; Gerrith the daughter of Gerrith, who had become the wise woman in her mother's place; and Halk, that strong man and slayer of Wandsmen, comrade of the martyred Yarrod. The rest had died when the men of Thyra took Stark and the others captive for Gelmar. Thanks to Gerrith and the interference of Kell à Marg Skaith-Daughter, who had insisted that Gelmar bring the strangers into the House of the Mother so that she might learn the truth of the rumored starships, Stark had escaped from the Wandsman. He had almost died in the dark catacombs under the Witchfires, in endless rooms and corridors long abandoned and forgotten by the Children of Skaith themselves. But he had at last made his way out by the north gate, to face the Northhounds and take the Citadel.
Gelmar still held Halk and Gerrith and was hurrying them south to be displayed before the walls of Irnan as evidence of the failure and folly of the revolt which had flared so suddenly into bloody violence. Irnan still stood against the anger of the Wandsmen, defying siege, hoping for allies and waiting for word from the north. When it became known that the Citadel had truly fallen, that the Lords Protector were human and vulnerable even as other men, then other city-states would be encouraged to join with Irnan in striking out for the freedom of the stars.
Stark knew that he could count on the Lords Protector and the Wandsmen to do everything in their power to stop him. And their power was enormous. Here in the thinly populated north they maintained it by bribery and diplomacy rather than by strength. But in the Fertile Belt, the green girdle that circled the planet's middle zones and contained the bulk of her surviving peoples, their power was based on long tradition and on the mob rule of the Farers, those wayward charges of the Lords Protector who lived only for joy beneath their dying sun. Where necessary, the Wandsmen also employed well-armed and disciplined mercenary troops such as the Izvandians. The farther south Stark went, the more formidable his enemies would become.
Stark's mount was beginning to give out. He was just too big for it. Ashton's was in better case, having less to carry. In spite of his years Ashton retained the rawhide leanness Stark remembered from the beginning, the same tough alertness of eye and mind and body. Even after numerous promotions had landed him in a soft job with the Ministry of Planetary Affairs, Ashton had refused to become deskbound. He continued stubbornly to do his researches into planetary problems in the field, which was why he had come to Skaith and run himself head-on into the Wandsmen.
At least, Stark thought, he had gotten Ashton out of the Citadel alive and safe. If he did not get him back to Skeg and off-planet the same way, it would not be for lack of trying.
The wind blew stronger. The sand moved under it with a dreary restlessness. The hounds trotted patiently: Gerd, who would have been king-dog after Flay; Grith, the great grim bitch who was his mate; and the seven other survivors of the attack on the Citadel—hellhounds with deadly eyes and their own secret way of killing. Old Sun seemed to pause on the rim of the mountain wall as if to rest and gather strength for the final plunge. In spite of himself, Stark felt a passing fear that this descent might be the last one and that the ginger star might never rise again, a common phobia among Skaithians which he seemed to be acquiring. Shadows collected in the hollows of the desert. The air turned colder.
Gerd said abruptly, Things coming.