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Bird of Prey

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

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Science Fiction

Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust

www.mzbworks.com

Copyright ©1957, 1985 by Marion Zimmer Bradley

First published in Venture Science Fiction, 1957

NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser. Making copies of this work or distributing it to any unauthorized person by any means, including without limit email, floppy disk, file transfer, paper print out, or any other method constitutes a violation of International copyright law and subjects the violator to severe fines or imprisonment.

Bird of Prey

Marion Zimmer Bradley

It would be an hour before I could board the starship. Straight ahead, an open gateway led to the spaceport, and the white skyscraper which was the Headquarters of the Terran Empire on Wolf; behind me. Phi Coronis was dipping down over the roofs of the Kharsa—the Old Town—which lay calm in the bloody sunset, but alive with the sounds and the smells of human, nonhuman and half-human life. The pungent reek of incense from an open street-shrine made my nostrils twitch, and a bulked form inside, not human, cast me a surly green glance as I turned aside into the cafe at the spaceport gates.

It wasn’t crowded inside. A pair of furred chaks lounged beneath the mirrors at the far end. One or two spaceport personnel, in storm gear, were drinking coffee at the counter, and a trio of Dry-towners, rangy lean men in colorful shirtcloaks, stood at a wall-shelf, eating Terran food with aloof dignity. In my neat business clothes I felt more conspicuous than the furred and long-tailed chaks; an Earthman, a civilian. I ordered, and by unconscious habit, carried my food to a wall-shelf near the Dry-towners, the only native humans on Wolf.

They were tall as Earthmen, weathered by the fierce sun of their parched cities of dusty salt stone—the Dry Towns which lie in the bleached bottoms of Wolf’s vanished oceans. Their dialect fell soft and familiar on my ears. One, without altering his expression or his easy tone, had begun to make elaborate comments on my entrance, my appearance, my ancestry and probable personal habits, all defined in the colorfully obscene dialect of the Dry Towns.

I leaned over and remarked, in the man’s own dialect, that at some future and unspecified time I would appreciate an opportunity to return their compliments.

By custom they should have apologized, and laughed at a jest decently reversed on themselves. Then we would have bought each other a drink, and that would have been that. But it didn’t happen that way. Not this time.

Instead, to my dismay, one of them fumbled inside the clasp of his shirtcloak; I edged backward, and found my own hand racing upward, seeking a skean I hadn’t carried in six years. It looked like a rough-house.

The chaks in the corner moaned and chattered. Then I became aware that the three Dry-towners were gazing, not at me, but at something, or someone, just behind me. Their skeans fumbled back into the clasps of their cloaks, and they surged back a pace or two.

Then they broke ranks, turned and ran. They ran—blundering into stools as they went, leaving a havoc of upset benches and broken crockery in their wake. I let my breath go, turned, and saw the girl.

She was slight, with waving hair like spun black glass, circled with a tracery of stars. A black glass belt imprisoned her waist, like clasped hands, and her robe, stark white, bore an ugly sprawl of embroidery across the breasts—the hideous toad-god, Nebran. Her face was all human, all woman, but the crimson eyes held a hint of alien mischief.

Then she stepped backward, and with one swift movement she was outside in the dark street. A smudge of incense from the street-shrine blurred the air; there was a little stirring, like the rising of heat waves in the salt desert at noon. Then the shrine of Nebran was empty, and nowhere in the street was there a sign of the girl; she simply was not there.

I turned toward the spaceport, slowly, walking through a dragging reluctance, trying to file the girl away in memory as just another riddle of Wolf that I’d never solve.

I’d never solve another riddle on Wolf. I’d never see it again. When the starship lifted at dawn, I’d be on it, outbound from Phi Coronis—the red sun of Wolf.

I strode toward the Terran H.Q.

No matter what the color of the sun, once you step inside an H.Q. building, you are on Terra. The Traffic Division was efficiency made insolent, in glass and chrome and polished steel. I squinted, readjusting my eyes to the cold yellowness of the light, and watched myself stride forward in a dozen mirrors; a tall man with a scarred face, bleached by years spent under a red sun. Even after six years, my neat civilian clothes didn’t fit quite right, and, with unconscious habit, I still walked with the lean stoop of the Dry-towners I had impersonated. The clerk, a rabbitty little man, raised his head in civil inquiry.

“My name’s Cargill,” I told him. “Have you a pass for me?”

He stared. A free pass aboard a starship is rare except for professional spacemen, which I obviously wasn’t. “Let me check my records,” he hedged, and punched scanning buttons on the mirror top of the desk. “Brill, Cameron—ah, yes, Cargill—are you Race Cargill of the Secret Service, sir? The Race Cargill? Why, I thought—I mean—everybody took it for granted that you were—”

“You thought I’d been killed a long time ago because my name never turned up in the news? Yes, I’m Race Cargill. I’ve been working upstairs on Floor 38 for six years, holding down a desk any clerk could handle.”

He gawped. “You, the man who went to Charin in disguise and routed out The Liess? And you’ve been working upstairs all these years? It’s—hard to believe, sir!”

My mouth twitched. It had been hard for me to believe while I was doing it. “The pass?”

“Right away, sir.” There was respect in his voice now, despite those six years. Six years of slow death since Rakhal Sensar had left me a marked man, my scarred face making me a target for all my old enemies, and ruining my career as a Secret Service man.

Rakhal Sensar—my fists knotted with the old, impotent hate. And yet, it had been Rakhal Sensar who had first led me into the secret byways of Wolf, teaching me a dozen alien languages, coaching me in the walk and step of a Dry-towner, perfecting a disguise which had become deep second nature to me. Rakhal was a Dry-towner from Shainsa, and he had worked in the Terran Secret Service, my partner since we were boys. Even now I was not sure why he had erupted, one day, into the violence that ended our friendship.

Then he had simply disappeared, leaving me a marked man, my usefulness to the Secret Service ended … a bitter man tied to a desk … and a lonely man—Juli had gone with him.

With a small whirring noise, a chip of plastic emerged from a slot on the desk. I pocketed the pass, and thanked the clerk.

I went down the skyscraper steps, and across the vast expanse of the spaceport, avoiding or ignoring the last-minute bustle of cargo loading, process crews, curious spectators. The starship loomed over me, huge and hateful.

A steward took me to a cabin, then strapped me into the bunk, tugging at the acceleration belts until my whole body ached. A long needle went into my arm—the narcotic that would keep me safely drowsy during takeoff. Doors clanged, men moved and talked in the corridors with a vague excitement. All I knew about Theta Centaurus, my destination, was that it had a red sun, and the Legate on Megaera could use a trained Secret Service man. And not pin him down at a desk. My mind wandered and it was a pair of crimson eyes, and hair like spun black glass, that tumbled down with me, down to the bottomless pit of sleep…. someone was shaking me.

“Ah, come on, Cargill. Wake up, fella.”

My eyes throbbed, and when I got them open I saw two men in the black leather of spaceforce guards, mingled with some vague memory of a dream. We were still inside gravity. I came all the way awake with a rush, swinging my legs out of the bunk, flinging aside the belts somebody had unfastened.

“What the devil—Is something wrong with my pass?”

He shook his head. “Magnusson’s orders. Ask him about it. Can you walk?”

I could, although my feet were a little shaky on the ladders.

I knew it made no sense to ask what was going on. They wouldn’t know. I asked anyway. “Are they holding the ship for me?”

“Not that one,” he answered.

My head was clearing fast, and the walk speeded up the process. As the elevator swooped up to Floor 38, my anger mounted. Magnusson had been sympathetic when I resigned; he’d arranged the transfer and the pass himself. What right did he have to grab me off an outbound starship at the last minute? I barged into his office without knocking.

“What’s this all about, chief?”

Magnusson was at his desk, a big bull of a man who always looked as if he’d slept in his rumpled uniform.

He said, not looking up, “Sorry, Cargill, but there was just time to get you off the ship—no time to explain.”

There was somebody in the chair in front of his desk; a woman, sitting very straight, her back to me. But when she heard my voice, she twisted around, and I stared, rubbing my eyes. Then she cried out, “Race, Race! Don’t you know me?”

I took one dazed step forward. Then she had flown across the space between us, her thin arms tangling around my neck, and I caught her up.

“Juli!”

“Oh, Race, I thought I’d die when Mac told me you were leaving tonight, it was the only thing that kept me going, the thought of seeing you,” she sobbed and laughed at once. I held my sister at arm’s length, looking down at her. I saw the six years that divided us, all of them, printed plain on her face. Juli had been a pretty child; six years had fined her features into beauty, but there was tension in the set of her shoulders, and the gray eyes had looked into horrors.

I said, “What’s wrong, Juli? Where’s Rakhal?” I felt her shiver, a deep thing that I could feel right up through my own arms.

“I don’t know. He’s gone. And—oh, Race, he’s taken Rindy with him!”

“Who’s Rindy?”

She didn’t move.

“My daughter, Race. Our little girl.”

Magnusson’s voice sounded low and harsh. “Well, Cargill? Should I have let you go?”

“Don’t be a damned fool!”

“Juli, tell Race what you told me—just so he’ll know you didn’t come for yourself.”

I knew that, already. Juli was proud, and she had always been able to live with her own mistakes. This wouldn’t be any simple complaint of an abused wife.

She said, “You made your big mistake, Mac, when you turned Rakhal out of the Service. He was one of the best men you had.”

“Matter of policy. I never knew how his mind worked. Do you, Juli? Even now? That final episode—Juli, have you taken a good look at your brother’s face?”

Juli raised her eyes, and I saw her wince. I knew just how she felt; for almost three years I’d kept my mirror covered. Then she said, almost inaudibly, “Rakhal’s face is—is just as bad.”

“That’s some satisfaction,” I said.

Mac looked baffled. “Even now I don’t know what it was all about.”

“And you never will,” I said for the dozenth time. “Nobody could understand it, unless he’d lived in the Dry Towns. Let’s not talk about that. You talk, Juli. What brought you here? And what about the kid?”

“At first Rakhal worked as a trader in Shainsa,” Juli began. I wasn’t surprised. The Dry Towns were the core of Terran trade on Wolf. “Rakhal didn’t like what the Empire was doing. But he tried to keep out of it. There were times—they’d come to him and ask for information, information he could have given them, but he never told anything—”

Mac grunted, “Yeah, he’s an angel. Go ahead.”

Juli didn’t, not immediately; instead, she asked, “Is it true what he told me—that the Empire has a standing offer of a reward for a working model of a matter-transmitter?”

“That offer’s been standing for five hundred years, Terran reckoning. Don’t tell me he was going to invent one!”

“I don’t think so, no. But he heard rumors—he knew about one. He said he was going to try to find it—for money and Shainsa. He started coming in at odd times—wouldn’t talk to me about it. He was queer about Rindy. Funny thing. Crazy. He’d brought her some kind of nonhuman toy from one of the inland towns, Charin, I think. It was a weird thing, scared me. He’d talk to her about it and Rindy would gabble all kinds of nonsense about little men and birds and a toymaker—it changed him, it—”

Juli swallowed hard, twisting her thin fingers in her lap. “A weird thing—1 was afraid of it, and we had a terrible fight. He threw it out and Rindy woke up and shrieked, she screamed for hours and hours. Then she dug it up out of a trashpile, she broke all her fingernails but she kept on digging for it, we never knew where or why, and Rakhal was like a crazy man—” abruptly Juli checked herself, and visibly caught at vanishing self-control.

Magnusson broke in, very gently. “Juli, tell Race about the riots in Charin.”

“In Charin—oh. I think he led the rioting; he came back with a knife cut in his thigh. I asked him if he was mixed up in the anti-Terran movements, and when he wouldn’t answer—that was when I threatened to leave him, and he said if I came there—I’d never see Rindy again. The next day he was gone—”

Suddenly the hysteria Juli had been forcing back broke free and she rocked back and forth in her chair, torn and shaken with great strangling sobs. “He—took Rindy! Oh, Race, he’s crazy, crazy, I think he hates Rindy, he took—he smashed her toys, Race, he took every toy she had and broke them one by one, smashed them into powder, every toy she had—”

“Juli. Juli, please—” Magnusson pleaded. I looked at him, shaken. “If we’re dealing with a maniac—”

“Mac, let me handle this. Juli. Shall I find Rakhal for you?”

A hope was born in her ravaged face, and died there, while I looked. “He’d have you killed. Or kill you.”

“He’d try, you mean,” I amended. I stooped and lifted Juli, not gently, my hands gripping at her shoulders in a sort of rage.

“And I won’t kill him—do you hear? He may wish I had, when I get through with him—hear me, Juli? I’ll beat the living daylights out of him, but I’ll settle it with him like an Earthman.”

Magnusson stepped toward me and pried my crushing hands off her shoulders. He said, “Okay, Cargill. So we’re all crazy. I’ll be crazy too—try it your way.”

A month later, I found myself near the end of a long trail.

I hadn’t seen an Earthman or a Dry-towner in five days. Charin was mostly a chak town; not many humans lived there, and it was the core and center of the resistance movement. I’d found that out before I’d been there an hour.

I crouched along the shadow of a wall, looking toward the gypsy glare of fires, hot and reeking at the far end of the Street of the Six Shepherds. My skin itched from the dirty shirtcloak I hadn’t changed in days—shabbiness is wise in nonhuman parts, and Dry-towners from the salt lands think too highly of water to spend much of it in washing, anyway.

It had been a long and difficult trail. But I’d been lucky. And if my luck held, Rakhal would be somewhere in the crowd around those fires.

A dirty, dust-laden wind was blowing up along the street, heavy with the reek of incense from a street shrine. I took a few steps toward the firelight, then stopped, hearing running feet.

Somewhere, a girl screamed.

Seconds later, I saw her; a child, thin and barefoot, a tangle of dark hair flying loose as she darted and twisted to elude the lumbering fellow at her heels. His outstretched paw jerked cruelly at one slim wrist.

The girl sobbed and wrenched herself free and threw herself straight on me, wrapping herself around my neck with the violence of a stormwind. Her hair got in my mouth, and her small hands gripped at my back like a cat’s flexed claws. “Oh, help me,” she sobbed, “don’t let him, don’t—” And even in that broken cry, I took it in; the brat did not speak the jargon of the slum, but the pure, archaic Shainsa dialect.

What I did then was just as automatic as if it had been Juli; I pulled the kid’s fists loose, shoved her behind me, and scowled at the pig-eyed fellow who lurched toward us. “Make yourself scarce,” I advised.

The man reeled; I smelled sour wine and the rankness of his rags as he thrust one grimy paw at the girl.

I thrust myself between them and put my hand on the skean quickly.

“Earthman!” The man spit out the word like filth.

“Earthman!” Someone took up the howl; there was a stir, a rustle, all along the street that had seemed empty, and from nowhere, it seemed, the space in front of me was crowded with shadowy forms, human and—otherwise.

“Grab him, Spilkar! Run him outa Charin!”

“Earthman!”

I felt the muscles across my belly knotting into a hard band of ice. I didn’t believe I’d given myself away as an Earthman—the bully was using the old Wolf tactic of stirring up a riot in a hurry—but just the same I looked quickly round, hunting a path of escape.

“Put your skean in his guts, Spilkar!”

“Hai-ai! Earth man! Hai-ai!”

It was that last sound that made me panic, the shrill yelping Hai-ai of the Ya-men. Through the sultry glare of the fires, I could see the plumed and taloned figures, leaping and rustling; the crowd melted open.

“Hai-ai! Hai-ai!”

I whirled, snatching the girl up, and high-tailed it back the way I’d come, only faster. I heard the yelping shrieks of the Ya-men behind me, and the rustle of their stiff plumes; I dived headlong around the corner, ducked into an alley, and set the girl on her feet.

“Run, kid!”

“No, no! This way!” she urged in a hasty whisper, and her small fingers closed like a steel trap around my wrist; she jerked hard, and I found myself plunging forward into the shelter of a street-shrine.

“Here—” she panted, “stand in—close to me, on the stone—” I drew back, startled.

“Oh, don’t stop to argue,” she whimpered. “Come here! Quick!”

“Hai-ai! Earth man! There he is—”

The girl’s arms flung round me again; I felt her slight, hard body pressing on mine, and she literally hauled me toward the center of the shrine.

The world tilted. The street disappeared in a cone of spinning lights, stars plummeted crazily, and I plunged down—locked in the girl’s arms—spun—dropped head-over-heels through reeling lights and shadows that wheeled around us. The yelping of the Ya-men whispered away in unimaginable distances, and for a second I felt the swift unmerciful blackout of a powerdive, with blood breaking from my nostrils and filling my mouth….

Light flared in my eyes. I was standing square on my feet in a little street-shrine—but the street was gone. Coils of incense still smudged the air, the God squatted, toadlike, in his recess; the girl was still hanging limp, locked between my clenched arms. As the floor straightened under my feet, I staggered forward, thrown off balance by the sudden return of the girl’s weight, and grabbed, blindly, for support.

“Give her to me,” said a voice at my ear, and the girl’s light sagging body was lifted from my arms. A strong hand grasped my elbow; I found a chair beneath my knees, and sank gratefully into it.

“The transmission isn’t smooth between such distant terminals,” the voice remarked, “I see that Miellyn has fainted again. A weakling, the girl, but useful.”

I spat blood, trying to get the room in focus. For I was inside a room; windowless, but with a transparent skylight, through which pink daylight streamed in thin long splinters. Daylight—and it had been midnight in Charin! I’d come halfway around the planet in a few seconds!

From somewhere, the room was filled with a sound of hammering; tiny, bell-like hammering, a fairy’s anvil. I looked up and saw a man—a man?—watching me.

On Wolf you see all kinds of human, nonhuman and half-human life. I consider myself an expert on all three. But I had never seen anyone who so closely resembled the ordinary human—and so obviously wasn’t. He, or it, was tall and lean, humanoid, but oddly muscled, a vague suggestion of something less than human in the lean hunch of his body. Manlike, he wore tight-fitting trunks, and a shirt of green fur that revealed bulging biceps where they shouldn’t be, and angular planes where there should have been swelling muscles. The shoulders were high and hunched, the neck unpleasantly sinuous, and the face, only a little narrower than human, was handsomely arrogant, with a kind of wary, alert mischief that was the least human thing about him.

He bent, tilted the girl’s inert body on to a divan of some sort, and turned his back on her, lifting his hand in an impatient gesture.

All the little tinkling hammers stopped as if their switch had been turned out.

“Now,” said the nonhuman, “we can talk.”

Like the waif, he spoke the archaic Shainsa, with its lilting, sing-song rise and fall. I asked in the same language, “What happened? Who are you? And where am I?”

The nonhuman crossed his hands. “Do not blame Miellyn. She acted under orders. It was imperative to bring you here, and we had reason to believe you might ignore an ordinary summons. You were clever at evading our surveillance—for a while. But there would not have been two Dry-towners in Charin tonight. You are Rakhal Sensar?”

Rakhal Sensar!

Shaken, I pulled a rag from my pocket and wiped the blood from my mouth. As far as I knew, there was no resemblance between Rakhal and myself—but it occurred to me, for the first time, that any casual description would fit either of us. Humans, tall and lean and without distinctive coloring, with the Dry-towner’s walk and speech, and the same scars across face and mouth—and I’d been hanging around in Rakhal’s old haunts. The mistake was natural; and natural or not, I wasn’t going to deny it.

“We knew,” the nonhuman continued, “that if you remained where you were, the Earthman who has been trailing you—Cargill—would have made his arrest. We knew about your quarrel with Cargill—among other things—but we did not consider it necessary that you should fall into his hands.”

I was puzzled. “I still don’t understand. Exactly where am I?”

“This is the Master-shrine of Nebran.”

Nebran! Knowing what Rakhal would have done, I hastily made the quick good-luck gesture, gabbling a few archaic words.

Like every Earthman on Wolf, I’d seen blanked impassive faces at mention of the Toad-god. Rumor made his spies omniscient, his priesthood virtually omnipotent, his powers formidable. I had believed about a tenth of what I heard, but even that was considerable. Now I was in his shrine, and the device which had brought me here, without a doubt, was a working model of a matter-transmitter.

A matter-transmitter—a working model—Rakhal was after it.

“And who,” I asked slowly, “are you, Lord?”

The green-clad creature hunched his shoulders in a ceremonious bow. “My name is Evarin. Humble servant of Nebran and yourself, honorable sir,” he added, but there was no humility in his manner. “I am called the Toymaker.”

Evarin. That was another name given weight by rumor; a breath of gossip in a thieves market, a scrawled name on a torn scrap of paper—a blank folder in Terran Intelligence. A Toymaker…

The girl on the divan sat up, passing slim hands over her disheveled hair. “My poor feet,” she mourned, “they are black and blue with the cobbles, and my hair is filled with sand and tangles! Toymaker, I will do no more of your errands! What way was this to send me to entice a man?”

She stamped one small bare foot, and I saw that she was not nearly as young as she had looked in the street; although immature by Terran standards, she had a fair figure for a Dry-town girl. Her rags fell around her slim legs in graceful folds, her hair was spun black glass, and I suddenly saw what the confusion in the filthy street had kept me from seeing before.

It was the girl of the spaceport cafe—the girl with the Toad-god embroidered on the breast of her robes, who had sent the Dry-towners to running madly, insane with terror.

I saw that Evarin was watching me, and turned idly away. Evarin said, with a kind of rueful impatience, “You know you enjoyed yourself, Miellyn. Run along and make yourself beautiful again.”

She danced out of the room.

The Toymaker motioned to me. “This way,” he directed, and led me through a different door. The offstage hammering I had heard, tiny bell-tones like a fairy xylophone, began again as the door opened, and we passed into a workroom which made me remember nursery tales from a half-forgotten childhood on Terra.

For the workers were tiny, gnarled—trolls! They were chaks—chaks from the Polar mountains, furred and half-human, with witchlike faces, but transformed, dwarfed. Tiny hammers pattered on miniature anvils, in a tinkling, jingling chorus of musical clinks and taps. Beady eyes focused, like lenses, over winking jewels and gimcracks. Busy elves. Makers of—

Toys!

Evarin jerked his hunched shoulders with an imperative gesture; I recalled myself, following him through the fairy workroom, casting lingering glances at the work tables. A withered leprechaun set eyes into the head of a minikin hound; delicate fingers worked precious metals into invisible filigree for the collarpiece of a dainty dancing doll with living emerald eyes; metallic feathers were thrust in clockwork precision into the wings of a skeleton bird no larger than a fingernail. The nose of the hound wobbled sensitively, the bird’s wings quivered, the eyes of the little dancer swiveled to follow me as I passed.

Toys?

“Come along.” Evarin rapped, and a door slid shut behind us. The clinks and taps grew faint, fainter. But never ceased.

“Now you know, Rakhal, why I am called Toymaker. Is it not strange—the Masterpriest of Nebran a maker of Toys, the shrine of the Toad-god a workshop for children’s playthings?” Evarin didn’t wait for an answer. From a sliding cabinet, he took out a doll.

She was, perhaps, the length of my longest finger, molded to the precise proportions of woman, and costumed in the bizarre fashion of the Shainsa dancers. Evarin touched no button or key visible to me, but when he set the figurine on its feet, it executed a whirling, arm-tossing dance, in a familiar and tricky tempo.

“I am, perhaps, in a sense, benevolent,” Evarin murmured. He snapped his fingers and the doll sank to her knees and posed there, silent. “Moreover, I have the means and—let us say—the ability to indulge my small fancies. The small daughter of the President of the Federation of Trade Cities was sent such a doll recently. What a pity that Paolo Arimengo was so suddenly impeached and banished!” The Toymaker clucked his teeth commiseratingly, “Perhaps a little companion—such as this—may comfort little Carmela for her adjustment to her new—position.”

He replaced the dancer and pulled down something like a whirligig. “This might interest you,” he mused, and set it spinning. I stared, entranced, at the wheeling pattern of lights and shadows that flowed and disappeared, melting in and out of visible patterns…

Suddenly I realized what the thing was doing. I wrested my eyes away with an effort. Had I blanked out?

Evarin arrested the compelling motion with one finger. “Several of these harmless toys are available to the children of important men,” he said absently, “an export of value for our impoverished and exploited world. Unfortunately, an incidence of nervous breakdowns is—oh—interfering somewhat with their sale. The children, of course, are unaffected, and—ah—love them.” Evarin set the hypnotic wheel moving again for an instant, glanced sidewise at me, and set it carefully back.

“Now—” Evarin’s voice, hard with the silkiness of a tiger-snarl, clawed across sudden silence. “We’ll talk business!”

He had something concealed in one hand. “You are probably wondering how we recognized and found you?” A panel cleared in the wall, and became translucent; confused flickers moved on the surface, then dropped into focus and I realized that the panel was an ordinary television screen and that I was looking down into the well-known interior of the Cafe of Three Rainbows, in the small Terran Colony at Charin. The focus gradually sharpened down on the long, Earth-type bar, where a tall man in spaceman’s leathers was talking with a pale-haired Terran girl.

Evan said at my ear, “By now, Race Cargill has decided that you fell into his trap and the hands of the Ya-men.”

It seemed so unbearably funny that my shoulders twitched. Since I landed in Charin, I’d gone to great pains to avoid the Terran colony. And Rakhal, somehow, discovering this, had conveniently filled my empty place. By posing as me.

Evarin rasped, “Cargill meant to leave the planet and something stopped him. What? You could be of great use to us, Rakhal—but not with this blood-feud unsettled!”

That needed no elucidation. No Wolfan in his senses will make any bargain with a Dry-towner carrying an unresolved blood-feud. By law and custom, formal blood-feud takes precedence over any other business, public or private, and is sufficient and legal excuse for broken promises, neglected duties—even theft or murder.

“We want this feud settled, once and for all,” Evarin’s voice was low, and unhurried, “and we’re not above weighting the scales. This man Cargill can, and has, posed as a Dry-towner. We don’t like Earthmen who can spy on us that way. In settling your blood-feud, you would do us a service, and we would be grateful. Look.”

He opened his closed hand, displaying something small, curled, inert.

“Every living being emits a characteristic pattern of electrical nerve impulses. As you may have guessed, we have methods of recording these individual patterns, and we have had you and Cargill under observation for a long time. We’ve had plenty of opportunity to key this—Toy—to Cargill’s personal pattern.”

On his palm the curled, inert thing stirred and spread wings; a fledgling bird lay there, small soft body throbbing slightly; half-hidden in a ruff of metallic feathers, I glimpsed a grimly elongated beak. The tiny pinions were feathered with delicate down less than a quarter of an inch long; they beat, with rough insistence, against the Toymaker’s prisoning fingers.

“This is not dangerous—to you. Press this point”—he showed me—”and if Race Cargill is within a certain distance—it is up to you to be within that distance—it will find Cargill and kill him. Unerringly, inescapably and untraceably. We will not tell you the critical distance. And we give you three days.”

He checked my startled exclamation with a gesture. “It is only fair to tell you; this is a test. Within the hour, Cargill will receive a warning. We want no incompetents who must be helped too much. Nor do we want cowards! If you fail, or try to evade the test—” there was green and inhuman malice in his eyes—”we have made another bird.”

He was silent, but I thought I understood the complexity of Wolf illogic. “The other bird is keyed to me?”

With slow contempt, Evarin shook his head.

“You? You are used to danger and fond of a gamble. Nothing so simple! We have given you three days. If, within that time, the bird you carry has not killed, the other bird will fly, and it will kill. Rakhal Sensar—you have a wife…”

Yes, Rakhal had a wife. They could threaten his wife…. And his wife was my sister Juli…

Everything after that was anticlimax. Of course I had to drink wine with Evarin, the elaborately formal ritual without which no business agreement on Wolf is valid, and go through equally elaborate courtesies and formalities. Evarin entertained me with gory and technical descriptions of the methods by which the birds—and others of his hellish Toys—did their killing and their other tasks. Miellyn danced into the room and upset our sobriety by perching on my knee and drinking sips from my cup, and pouting prettily when I paid her less attention than she thought she merited. She even whispered something about a rendezvous in the Cafe of the Three Rainbows.

But eventually it was over, and I stepped through a door that twisted, and I spun again through a queer giddy blackness, and found myself outside a blank, windowless wall, back in Charin. I found my way to my lodging in a filthy chak hostel, and threw myself down on the verminous bed.

Believe it or not, I slept.

Later I went out into the reddening morning. I pulled Evarin’s toy from my pocket, unwrapped the silk slightly, and tried to make some sense from my predicament.

The little thing lay innocent and silent in my palm. It couldn’t tell me whether it had been keyed to me, the real Cargill, or to Rakhal, using my name and reputation in the Terran Colony. If I pressed the stud, it might hunt down Rakhal, and all my troubles would be over. On the other hand, if it killed me, presumably the other bird, keyed to Juli, would never fly—which would save her life, but would not get Rindy back for her. And if I delayed past Evarin’s deadline, one of the birds would hunt down Juli, and give her a swift and not too painless death.

I spent the day lounging in a chak dive, juggling a dozen plans frantically in my head. Toys, innocent and sinister. Spies, messengers. Toys which killed—and horribly. Toys which could be controlled by the pliant mind of a child—and every child hates his parents now and again!

I kept coming back to the same conclusion. Juli was in danger, but she was half a world away, while Rakhal was here in Charin, calmly masquerading as me. There was a child involved, Juli’s child, and I had made a promise involving that child; the first step was to get inside Charin’s Terran Colony, and see how the land lay.

Charin is a city shaped like a crescent moon, encircling the small Colony of the Trade City; a miniature spaceport, a miniature skyscraper of an HQ, the clustered dwellings of the Terrans who worked there and those who lived with them and catered to their needs.

Entry from one to another—since Charin is in hostile territory, and far beyond the impress of the ordinary Terran law—is through a guarded gateway; but the gate stood wide open, and the guards looked lazy and bored. They carried shockers, but they didn’t look as if they’d ever used them. One raised an eyebrow at his companion as I shambled to the gate and requested permission to enter the Terran Zone.

They inquired my name and business. I gave a Dry-towner name I’d used when I was known from Shainsa to the Polar Mountains, and tacked one of the Secret Service passwords to the end of it. They looked at each other again, and one said, “Yeah, this is the guy,” and they took me into the booth beside the gate and one of them used an intercom device. Presently they took me along into the HQ building, and into an office that said LEGATE.

Evidently I had walked straight into another trap. One of the guards asked me, straight out, “All right, now. Just what, exactly, is your business in the Terran Colony?”

“Terran business. You’ll have to make a visicall to check on me. Put me straight through to Magnusson’s office at Central HQ. The name’s Race Cargill.”

The guard made no move. He was grinning. He said to his partner. “Yeah, that’s the guy, all right, the one we were told to watch out for.” He put a hand on my shoulder and spun me around.

There were two of them, and spaceforce guards aren’t picked for their good looks. Just the same, I gave a good account of myself, until the inner door burst open and a man stormed out.

“What’s all this racket?”

One of the guards got a hammerlock on me, giving my arm a twist. “This Dry-towner bum tried to talk us into making a priority call to Magnusson—the Secret Service Chief, that is. He knew one or two of the Secret Service passwords—that’s how he got through the gate. Remember, Cargill passed the word that someone might turn up trying to impersonate him?”

“I remember.” The strange man’s eyes were wary and cold.

I found myself seized by the guards, and frog-marched to the gate; one of the men pushed my skean back into its clasp, the other pushed me, hard, and I stumbled, and fell sprawling on the chinked street.

First round to Rakhal. He had sprung the trap on me, very neatly.

The street was narrow and crooked, winding along between double rows of untidy pebble-houses. I walked for hours.

It was dusk when I realized that I was being followed.

At first it was a glance out of the corner of my eye, a head seen a little too frequently behind me for coincidence. It developed into a too-persistent footstep in an uneven rhythm; tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap.

I had my skean handy, but I had a hunch this wasn’t anything I could settle with a skean. I ducked into a side street, and waited for my follower.

Nothing.

After a time, I went on, laughing at my imagined fears.

Then, after a time, the soft and persistent footfall thudded behind me again.

I fled down a strange street, where women sat on flower-decked balconies, their open lanterns flowing with fountains and rivulets of gold and orange fire; I raced down quiet streets where furred children crept to doors and watched me pass, with great golden eyes that shone in the dusk.

I dodged into an alley and lay there. Someone not two inches away said softly, “Are you one of us, brother?” I muttered something surly in his dialect, and a hand seized my elbow. “This way, then.”

Taptaptap. TapTAPtap.

I let my arm relax in the hand that guided me. Wherever I was being taken, it might shake off my follower. I flung a fold of my shirtcloak over my face, and went along.

I stumbled over steps, then took a jolting stride downward and found myself in a dim room, jammed with dark figures, human and nonhuman. The figures swayed in the dimness, chanting in a dialect not altogether familiar to me; a monotonous wailing chant, with a single recurrent phrase: “Kamaina! Kamaina!” beginning on a high note, descending in a series of weird chromatics to the lowest tone the human ear could resolve. The sound made me draw back; even Dry-towners shunned the orgiastic rituals of Kamaina.

My eyes were adapting to the dim light and I saw that most of the crowd were Charin plainsmen and chaks; one or two wore Dry-towner shirtcloaks, and I even thought I saw an Earthman. They were all squatting around small crescent shaped tables, and all intently gazing at a flickery spot of light near the front. I saw an empty place at one table, and let myself drop there, finding the floor soft, as if cushioned. On each table, small, smudging pastilles were burning, and from these cones of ash-tipped fire came the steamy, swimmy smoke that filled the darkness with strange colors. Beside me, an immature chak girl was kneeling, her fettered hands strained tightly back at her sides, her naked breasts pierced with jeweled rings; beneath the pallid fur, cream-colored, flowing around her pointed ears, the exquisite animal face was quite mad.

There were cups and decanters on the table, and another woman tilted a stream of pale phosphorescent fluid into one cup, and proffered it to me.

I took a sip, then another; it was cold and pleasant, and not till the second swallow turned bitter on my tongue did I know what I tasted. I pretended to swallow while the woman’s phosphorescent eyes were fixed on me, then somehow contrived to spill the foul stuff down my shirt. I was wary even of the fumes, but there was nothing else I could do. It was shallavan, the reeking drug outlawed on every halfway decent planet in the Galaxy.

The scene itself looked like the worst nightmare of a drug-dreamer, ablaze with the colors of the smoking incense, the swaying crowd and their monotonous cries. Quite suddenly there was a blaze of orchid light and someone screamed in raving ecstasy, “No ki na Nebran n’hai Kamaina!”

“Kamaieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeena!” shrilled the entranced mob.

Evarin stood in the blaze of the lights. The Toymaker was as I had seen him last, cat-smooth, gracefully alien, shrouded in a ripple of giddy crimsons. Behind him there was a blackness. I waited until the painful blaze of the lights abated, then, straining to see past him, I got my worst shock.

A woman stood there, naked to the waist, her hands ritually fettered with little chains that stirred and clashed musically as she walked, stiff-legged, in a frozen dream. Hair like black glass combed into metallic waves banded her brow, and naked shoulders, and her eyes were crimson…

…and her eyes lived, in the dead face. They lived and they were mad with terror although the lips curved in a placid, dreaming smile.

Miellyn.

I realized that Evarin had been speaking for some time in that dialect I could barely understand. His arms were flung high, and his cloak went spilling away from them, rippling like something alive.

“Our world—an old world—”

“Kamaieeeena!” whimpered the shrill chorus.

“…humans, all humans, nothing but humans. They would make slaves of us all, slaves to the Children of the Ape…”

I blinked and rubbed my eyes to clear them of the incense fumes. I hoped what I saw was an optical illusion, drug-born. Something huge, something dark, was hovering over the girl. She stood placid, hands clasped on her chains, the wreathing smoke glimmering around her jewels, but her eyes writhed and implored in the stiff, frozen face.

Then something, I can only call it a sixth sense, warned me that there was someone outside that door. I’d been followed, probably by the Legate’s orders; my follower, tracing me here, had gone away and returned, with reinforcements.

Someone struck a blow on the door, and a stentorian voice bawled. “Open up, there! In the name of the Terran Empire!”

The chanting broke off in ragged quavers. Evarin glanced around, startled and wary. Somewhere a woman screamed; the lights abruptly went out, and a stampede started in the room. I thrust my way forward, with elbows and knees and shoulders, butting through the crowd. A dusky emptiness opened, and yawned, and I got a glimpse of sunlight and open sky, and knew that Evarin had stepped into somewhere and was gone. The banging on the door sounded like a whole regiment of spaceforce. I dived toward the shimmer of little stars which marked Miellyn’s tiara in the darkness, braving that black horror which hovered above her, and encountered rigid girl-flesh, cold as death.

I grabbed her, and ducked to the side—Every native building on Wolf has half-a-dozen concealed entrances and exits, and I know where to look for them. I pushed one, and found myself standing in a dark, peaceful street. One lonely moon was setting, low over the rooftops. I put Miellyn on her feet, but she moaned and leaned limply against me. I took off my shirtcloak and put it around her naked shoulders, then hoisted her in my arms. There was a chak-run cookshop down the street, a place I had once known, with an evil reputation and worse food, but it was quiet, and stayed open all night. I turned in at the door, bending under the low lintel.

The inside room was smoky and foul-smelling; I dumped Miellyn on one of the circular couches, sent the frowsy waiter for two bowls of noodles and coffee, handed him a few more coins than the food would warrant, and told him to leave us alone. He drew down the shutters and went.

I stared at the inert girl for a few seconds, then shrugged and started to eat one bowl of the noodles; my own head was still swimming with the fumes of incense and drug, and I wanted it clear. I wasn’t quite sure what I would do, but I had Evarin’s right-hand girl, and I meant to use her.

The noodles were greasy, but they were hot, and I ate all of one bowl before Miellyn stirred and whimpered and put up one hand, with a little musical clashing of chains, to her hair. Finding that the folds of my shirtcloak interfered, she made a convulsive movement and stared around her with growing bewilderment and dismay.

“You! What am I—”

“There was a riot,” I said briefly, “and Evarin ditched you. And you can stop thinking what you’re thinking. I put my cloak on you because you were bare to the waist and it didn’t look so good.” I stopped to think that over, then grinned and amended, “I mean, I couldn’t haul you around the street that way, it looked good enough.”

To my amazement she gave a shaky giggle. “If you’ll—”and held out her fettered hands. I chuckled and snapped the links. It didn’t take much strength—they were symbolic ornaments, not real chains, and many Wolf women wear them all the time.

Miellyn drew up her draperies and fastened them so that she was decently covered, then tossed me back my shirtcloak. “Rakhal, when I saw you there—”

“Later.” I shoved the bowl of noodles toward her.

“Eat it,” I ordered, “you’re still doped; the food will clear your head.” I packed up one of the mugs of coffee, and emptied it at a single swallow. “What were you doing in that place?”

Without warning she flung herself across the table, throwing her arms around my neck. For a minute, startled, I let her cling, then reached up and firmly unfastened her hands. “None of that, now. I fell for it once, and it landed me in the middle of the mudpie.”

Her fingers clutched at me with a feverish, tense grip. “Please, please listen to me! Have you still got the bird, the Toy? You haven’t set it off, yet? Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t, Rakhal, you don’t know what Evarin is, what he’s doing—” the words poured out of her in a flood, uncontrollable and desperate. “He’s won so many men like you—don’t let him have you too, they say you’re an honest man, you worked once for Terra, the Terrans would believe you if you went to them and told them—Rakhal, take me to the Terran zone, take me there, take me there where they’ll protect me from Evarin—”

At first I had leaned forward to protest, then waited and let the torrent of entreaty run on and on. At last she lay quiet, exhausted, her head fallen forward against my shoulder, her hands still clutching at me. The musky shallavan mingled with the flower-scents of her hair. At last, heavily, I said, “Kid, you and your Toymaker have both got me all wrong. I’m not Rakhal Sensar.”

“You’re not—” she drew back, regarding me in dismay and disbelief. “Then who—?”

“Race Cargill. Terran Intelligence.”

She stared at me, her mouth wide like a child’s.

Then she laughed. She laughed—I thought she was hysterical, and stared at her in consternation. Then, as her wide red eyes met mine, with all the mischief of Wolf illogic—I started to laugh.

“Cargill—you can take me to the Terrans where Evarin—”

“Damn!” I exploded, “I can’t take you anywhere, girl, I’ve got to find Rakhal!” I hauled out the Toy and slapped it down on the greasy table. “I don’t suppose you know which of us this is supposed to kill?”

“I know nothing about the Toys.”

“You know plenty about the Toymaker,” I said sourly.

“I thought so. Until last night.” She burst out, in an explosion of passionate anger, “It’s not a religion! It’s a front! For drugs and politics and—and every other filthy thing! I’ve heard a lot about Rakhal Sensar! Whatever you think of him, he’s too decent to be mixed up in that!”

The pattern was beginning to take shape in my mind. Rakhal had been on the trail of the matter-transmitter, and had fallen afoul of the Toymaker. Evarin’s words, you were very clever at escaping our surveillance for a while, made sense to me now; Juli had given me the clue. He smashed Rindy’s Toys. It had sounded like the act of a madman, but it made plain, good sense.

I said, “There’s some distance limitation on this thing, I understand. If I lock it inside a steel box and drop it in the desert, I’ll guarantee it won’t bother anybody. Miellyn, I don’t suppose you’d care to have a try at stealing the other one for me?”

“Why should you worry about Sensar’s wife?” she flashed.

For some reason it seemed important to set her straight. “My sister,” I explained. “The thing to do, I suppose, is to find Rakhal first—” I stopped, remembering something. “I can find Rakhal with that scanning device in the workshops. Take me to the Master-shrine, will you? Where’s the nearest street-shrine?”

“No! Oh, no, I don’t dare!”

I had to argue and plead, and finally threaten her, reminding her that except for me she would have been torn to pieces or worse, by a crowd of drugged and raving fanatics, before she finally consented to take me to a transmitter. She was shaking when she set her foot into the patterned stones. “I know what Evarin can do!” Then her red mouth twitched, in tremulous mischief. “You’ll have to stand closer than that, the transmitters are meant for only one person!”

I stooped and put my arm round her. “Like this?”

“Like this,” she whispered, pressing herself against me. A swirl of dizzy darkness swung around my head; the street vanished, and we stepped out into the terminal room in the Master-shrine, under a skylight darkened with the last splinters of the setting sun. Distant little hammering noises made a ringing in my ears.

Miellyn whispered, “Evarin’s not here, but he might jump through at any minute!” I paid no attention.

“Exactly where on the planet are we?”

Miellyn shook her head. “No one knows that except Evarin himself. There are no doors, just the transmitters—when we want to go outside, we jump through them. The scanning device is through there—we’ll have to go through the Little Ones’ workroom.” She opened the door of the workroom, and we walked through.

Not for years had I known that special feeling—thousands of eyes, all boring holes in the center of my back. I was sweating by the time we reached the farther door and it closed, safe and blessedly opaque behind us. Miellyn was shivering with reaction.

“Steady,” I warned. “We’ve still got to get out. Where’s that scanner?”

She touched the panel. “I’m not sure I can focus it accurately, though. Evarin’s never let me touch it.”

“How does it work?”

“The principle is just the same as the matter-transmitter; that is, it lets you look through to anywhere, but without jumping. It uses a tracer mechanism, just as the Toys do,” she added. “If Rakhal’s electrical-impulse pattern were on file anywhere, I could—wait! I know how we can do it! Give me the Toy.” I drew, it out; she took it quickly and unwrapped it. “Here’s a good, quick way to find out which of you this bird is intended to kill!”

I looked at the fledgling thing, soft and innocent in her palm. “Suppose it’s turned on me?”

“I wasn’t going to set it off.” Miellyn pushed aside the feathers, revealing a tiny crystal set into the bird’s skull. “The memory-crystal. If it’s tuned to your nerve-patterns, you’ll see yourself in the scanner, as if it were a mirror. If you see Rakhal—”

She touched the crystal against the surface of the screen. Little flickers of “snow” danced across the clearing panel; then, abruptly, a picture dropped into focus, the turned-away back of a man in a leather jacket. The man turned, slowly, and I saw first, a familiar profile, then saw the profile become a scarred mask, more hideous than my own. His lips were moving; he was talking to someone beyond the range of the lens.

Miellyn asked, “Is that—”

“It’s Rakhal, yes. Move the focus, if you can, try to get a look out of a window, or something. Charin’s a big city. If we could get a look at a landmark—”

Rakhal went on talking, soundlessly, like television without sound. Abruptly Miellyn said “There!” She had brought the scanning device within range of a window; Rakhal was inside a room that looked out on a high pylon and two or three uprights that looked like a bridge. I recognized the place at once, and so did Miellyn.

“The Bridge of Summer Snows, in Charin. I can find him now. Come on, turn if off, and let’s get out of here.” I was turning away from the screen when Miellyn gave a smothered scream.

“Look!”

Rakhal had turned his back on our scanning device, and for the first time we could see the person he was talking to. A hunched and catlike shoulder, twisted, revealing a sinuous neck, a handsome and arrogant face—

“Evarin!” I swore. “He knows, then, that I’m not Rakhal. He’s probably known all along. Come on, girl, we’re getting out of here.” She shoved the silk-wrapped bird into her skirt pocket and we ran through the workroom. We banged the workroom door shut behind us, and I shoved a heavy divan against it, barricading it shut.

Miellyn was already inside the recess where the Toad-god squatted. “There is a street-shrine just beyond The Bridge of Summer Snow. Hold me, hold me tight, it’s a long jump—” suddenly she froze in my arms, with a convulsive shudder. “Evarin—he’s jumping in! Quick!”

Space reeled around us.

We landed inside a street-shrine; I glimpsed the pylon, and the bridge, and the rising sun; then there was the giddy, internal wrench, a blast of icy air whistled around us; and we found ourselves gazing out at the Polar mountains, ringed in their eternal sunlight.

We jumped again, the wrenching sickness of disorientation forcing a moan from the girl, and dark clouds shivered around us; I looked out on an unfamiliar expanse of sand and wasteland and dust-bleared stars. Miellyn whimpered. “Evarin knows what I’m doing, he’s jumping us all around the planet, he can work the controls with his mind … Psychokinetics … I can do it, a little, only I’ve never … oh, hang on to me, tight, tight, I’ve never dared do this—”

Then began one of the most amazing duels ever fought. Miellyn would make some tiny movement; we would fall, blind and dizzy, through the blackness, halfway through the giddy spin, a new direction would wrench at us, and we would be thrust elsewhere—and look out on a different street. One instant we were in the Kharsa—I actually saw the door of the spaceport cafe, and smelled hot coffee—and an instant later it was blinding noon, with crimson fronds waving over-head, over the roofs of gilt temples. We froze and burned, moonlight, noon, dim twilight, in the terrible giddiness of hyperspace.

Then, suddenly, I caught a glimpse of the pylon, the bridge; luck or an oversight had landed us again for half a second in Charin. The blackness started to reel down again, but my reflexes are fast, and I made one swift, scrabbling step forward. We lurched, then sprawled, locked together, on the sharp stones of the bridge outside the street-shrine; bruised and bloody, but alive—and at our destination!

I lifted Miellyn to her feet; her eyes were dizzy with pain. Clinging together, the ground swaying madly under our feet, we fled along the Bridge of Summer Snows. At the far side, I looked up at the pylon. Judging by the angle, the place where we’d seen Rakhal couldn’t be far away. In this street there was a wineshop, a silk market, and one small private house. I walked up, and banged on the door.

Silence. I knocked again. From within there came a child’s shrill question, a deeper voice hushing it, and the door opened, to reveal a scarred face that drew back into a hideous facsimile of a grin.

“I thought it might be you, Cargill,” Rakhal said. “You’ve taken longer than I expected. Come in.”

He hadn’t changed much, except for the crimson, ugly scars that drew up mouth and nostril and jawline. His face was worse than mine. The mask tensed as he saw Miellyn, but he backed away to let us in, and shut the door behind us.

A little girl, in a fur smock, stood watching us. She had red hair like Juli’s, and evidently she knew just who I was, for she looked at me quite calmly, without surprise. Had Juli told her about me?

“Rindy,” Rakhal said quietly, “go into the other room.” The little girl, still staring at me, did not move. Rakhal added, in a gentle, curiously moderate voice, “Do you still carry a skean, Race?”

I shook my head. “That’s Juli’s daughter. I’m not going to kill her father under her eyes. Suddenly my rage spilled over. “To hell with your damned Dry-town blood-feud and codes and your filthy Toad-god!”

Rakhal’s voice was harsher now. “Rindy. I told you to get out.”

I took a step toward the little girl. “Don’t go, Rindy. I’m going to take her to Juli, Rakhal. Rindy, don’t you want to go to your mother?” I held out my arms to her.

Rakhal made a menacing gesture; Miellyn darted between us, and picked up Rindy in her arms. The child struggled and whimpered, but Miellyn took two quick steps and carried her bodily through an open door.

Rakhal began, slowly, to laugh.

“You’re as stupid as ever, Cargill. You still don’t realize—I knew Juli would come straight to you, if she was frightened enough. I thought it would lure you out of hiding—you filthy coward! Six years hiding in the Terran zone! If you’d had the guts to walk out with me when I engineered that final deal, we would have had the biggest thing on Wolf!”

“Doing Evarin’s dirty work?”

“You know damn well that had nothing to do with Evarin. It was for us—and Shainsa. Evarin—I might have known he’d get to you! That girl—if you’ve spoiled my plans—” Abruptly he whipped out his skean and came at me. “Son of the ape! I might have known better than to depend on you! I’ll finish your meddling, this time!”

I felt the skean drive home, slicing flesh and ribs, and staggered back, grunting with pain. I grappled with him, forcing back his hand. My side burned furiously, and I wanted to kill Rakhal and I couldn’t, and at the same time I was raging because I didn’t want to fight the crazy fool, I wasn’t even mad at him—

Miellyn flung the door open, shrieking. There was a flutter of silk, and then the Toy was darting, a small whirring droning horror, straight at Rakhal’s eyes.

There was no time even to warn him. I bent and butted him in the stomach; he grunted, doubled, and fell, out of the path of the diving Toy. It whirred in frustration, hovered, dived again. Rakhal writhed in agony, drawing up his knees, clawing inside his shirt.

“You damned—I didn’t want to use this—” He opened his closed fist, and suddenly there was another Toy in the room. An identical fledgling bird, and this one was diving at me—and in a split second I understood. Evarin had made the same arrangement with Rakhal, as with me.

From the door came a child’s wild shriek.

“Daddy!”

Abruptly the birds collapsed in mid-air and went limp. They fell, inanimate, to the floor, and lay there, quivering. Rindy dashed across the room, her small skirts flying, and grabbed one of the vicious things in each hand.

She stood there, tears pouring down her little face. Dark veins stood out like narrow cords on her temples. “Break them, quick. I can’t hang on to them any longer—”

Rakhal grabbed one of the Toys from a little fist, and smashed it under his heel. It shrilled and died. The other screamed like a living bird as his foot scrunched on the tiny feathers. He drew an agonized breath, his hands clutching his belly where I’d butted him.

“That blow was foul, Cargill, but I guess I know why you did it. You—” he stopped and said shame-facedly, “You saved my life. You know what that means. Did you know you were doing it?”

I nodded. It meant the end of the blood-feud. However we had wronged one another, this ended it, finally and forever.

He said, “Better get that skean out of your ribs, you damn’ fool. Here—” with a quick jerk he drew it out. “Not more than half an inch. Your rib must have turned it. Just a flesh wound. Rindy—”

She sobbed noisily, hiding her head on his shoulder. “The other Toys … hurt you … when I was mad at you. Daddy, only…” she dug her fists in her red eyes. “I wasn’t that mad at you, I wasn’t that mad at anybody … not even … him…”

He said over her head, “The Toys activate a child’s subconscious resentments against his parents. That also means a child can control them—for a few seconds; no adult can.”

“Juli told me you threatened Rindy—”

He chuckled. “What else could I have done that would have scared Juli enough to send her to you? Juli’s proud, nearly as proud as you, you stiffnecked son of the ape! She had to be desperate.”

He tossed it all aside with a shrug. “You’ve got Miellyn to take you through the transmitters. Go back to the Master-shrine, and tell Evarin I’m dead. In the Trade City, they think I’m Cargill; I can go in and out as I choose. I’ll ‘vise Magnusson, and have him send soldiers to guard the street-shrines; Evarin may try to escape through one of them.”

“Terra hasn’t enough guards on all Wolf to cover the street-shrines in Charin alone,” I objected, “and I can’t go back with Miellyn.” I explained why, and Rakhal pursed his lips and whistled when I described the fight in the transmitters.

“You have all the luck! I’ve never been near enough to be sure how the transmitters work, and I’ll bet you didn’t begin to understand! Well, we’ll do it the hard way. We’ll face Evarin down in his own shrine—if Rindy’s with us, we needn’t worry.”

I was shocked at his casual suggestion. “You’d take a child into that?”

“What else is there to do?” Rakhal inquired logically, “Rindy can control the Toys, and neither you nor I could do that, if Evarin should decide to throw his whole arsenal at us!” He called Rindy to him again, and spoke softly. She looked from her father to me, and back again to her father, then smiled, and stretched out her small hand to me.

While we hunted for another street-shrine—Miellyn had some esoteric reason for not wanting to use the same one we’d landed in—I asked Rakhal point-blank, “Are you working for Terra? Or for the resistance movement? Or for the Dry-towns?”

He shook his head. “I’m working for myself. I just want one thing, Race. I want the Dry-towns, and the rest of Wolf, to have a voice in their own government. Any planet which makes a substantial contribution to Galactic science, by the laws of the Terran Empire, gets the status of an independent commonwealth. If a Dry-towner discovers anything as valuable as a matter-transmitter, Wolf gets dominion status. And incidentally, I get a nice fat bonus, and an official position.”

Before I could answer, Miellyn touched my arm. “This is the shrine.”

Rakhal picked up Rindy, and the three of us crowded close together. The street swayed and vanished, and I felt the familiar dip and swirl of blackness. Rindy screamed with terror and pain, then the world straightened out again. Rindy was crying, dabbing smeary fists at her face. “Daddy, my nose is bleeding—”

Miellyn bent and wiped the blood from the snubby nose. Rakhal set his daughter on her feet.

“The chak workroom, Race. Smash everything you see. Rindy, if anything comes at us, stop it—stop it, quick!”

Her wide round eyes blinked, and she nodded, a solemn little nod. We flung open the door of the elves’ workshop with a shout. The ringing of the fairy anvils shattered into a thousand dissonances as I kicked over a workbench and half-finished Toys smashed in confusion to the floor.

The chaks scattered like rabbits before our advance. I smashed half-finished Toys, tools, filigree and jewels, stamping everything out with my heavy boots. A tiny doll, proportioned like a woman, dashed at me, shrilling in a high supersonic shriek; I put my foot on her and ground the life out of her. She screamed like a living woman as she came apart. Her blue eyes rolled from her head and lay on the floor watching me, still alive; I crushed the blue jewels under my foot.

I was drunk with crushing and shattering and ruining when I heard Miellyn shriek in warning, and turned to see Evarin standing in the doorway. He raised both hands in a sardonic gesture, then turned, and with a queer, loping, inhuman run, headed for the transmitter.

“Rindy,” Rakhal panted, “can you block the transmitter?”

Instead Rindy screamed. “We’ve got to get out! The house is falling down! It’s going to fall on us—look—look at the roof!”

Transfixed by her horror, I looked up, to see a wide rift opening in the ceiling. The skylight shattered, broke, and daylight poured through the cracking, translucent walls. Rakhal snatched up Rindy, protecting her from the falling debris with his head and shoulders; I grabbed Miellyn around the waist, and we ran for the rift that was widening in the cracking wall. We shoved through, just before the roof caved in, the walls collapsed and we found ourselves standing on a bare, grassy hillside, looking down in shock and horror, as, below us, section after section of what was, apparently, bare hill and rock caved in and collapsed into dusty rubble.

Miellyn cried hoarsely, “Run! Run—hurry!”

I didn’t understand, but I ran.

Then the shock of a great explosion rocked the earth, hurling me to the ground, Miellyn falling in a heap on top of me. Rakhal stumbled, went down to his knees. When I could see again, I looked at the hillside.

There was nothing left of Evarin’s hideaway, or of the Master-shrine of Nebran, but a great, gaping hole, still oozing smoke and black dust.

“Destroyed! All destroyed!” Rakhal raged. “The workroom, all the science of the Toys, the secret of the transmitters—” He beat his fists furiously. “Our one chance to learn—”

“You’re lucky you got out alive,” said Miellyn quietly. “Where are we?”

I looked down, and stared in amazement. Spread out below us lay the Kharsa, and straight ahead, the white skyscraper of the Terra HQ and the big spaceport. I pointed.

“Down there. Rakhal, you can make your peace with the Terrans, and with Juli. And you, Miellyn—”

Her smile was shaky. “I can’t go into the Terran Zone like this. Have you a comb? Rakhal, lend me your shirtcloak, my robes are torn, and—”

“Stupid female, worrying about a thing like that at a time like this!” Rakhal’s look was like murder. I put my comb into her hand, then, abruptly saw something in the symbols embroidered across her breasts.

I reached out, and ripped the cloth away.

“Cargill!” she protested angrily, turning crimson and covering her bared breasts with both hands. “Is this the place—and before a child, too—”

I hardly heard her. “Look,” I exclaimed, snatching at Rakhal’s sleeve, “look at the symbols embroidered into the God! You can read the old nonhuman glyphs, I’ve seen you do it! I’ll bet the formula is written out there for everyone to read! Look here, Rakhal! I can’t read it, but I’ll bet it’s the equations for the matter-transmitter.”

Rakhal bent his head over the torn robe. “I believe you have it!” he exclaimed, shaken and breathless. “It may take years to translate the glyph, but I can do it! I’ll do it, or die trying!” His scarred face looked almost handsome, and I grinned at him.

“If Juli leaves enough of you, once she finds out what you did to her. Look, Rindy’s asleep. Poor little kid, we’d better get her down to her mother.”

We walked abreast, and Rakhal said softly, “Like old times, Race.”

It wasn’t like old times, and I knew he would see it, too, once his exultation sobered. I had outgrown my love for intrigue, and I had a feeling this was Rakhal’s last adventure, too. It would take him, as he said, years to work out the equations for the transmitter.

And I had a feeling that my own solid, ordinary desk was going to look pretty good to me in the morning.

But I knew now, that I’d never leave Wolf. It was my own beloved sun that was rising. My sister was waiting down below, and I’d given her back her child.

My friend was walking at my side. What more could a man want?

I looked at Miellyn, and smiled.

END

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