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seemed to have lost consciousness. "I admit I was sorry for the kid too, but this
seems to be a little extreme."
Rianna smiled faintly. "That had nothing to do with it," she said, dropping her
voice to a pitch that could not be heard an arm's length away. "Now we have a
native guide who is honor bound to assist me in all matters, and keep secret all my
doings, however strange they may seem to him. Don't you remember from the "
she stopped and glanced around; no one was near them, but she still did not use the
Unity word, rephrasing. "Don't you remember, this is considered a more sacred and
binding relationship than the usual clan and family ties. Even if he should find out
the truth
about us which I am not planning to tell him he will be honor bound to remain
loyal to us. And I'm sure he will be useful."
Dane shrugged. The kid might, after all, have access to useful information, if they
could manage to ask him the right questions. But he certainly would be nothing
more than a burden if they had to do any more fighting. And he wasn't a
particularly likable kid.
The old caravan-master stayed away from them for quite a while. Of course he was
busy there were bodies to be buried, and after they had moved on, there was
doubtless much to demand his attention.
It was not, in fact, until after the caravan had camped for the night that he spoke to
them again.
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r r
Belsar was setting behind the wall of vines. They had just finished helping the
servants of the Noble Mother OOa-nisha set up her pavilion which was the size of
a small circus tent. The four travelers and Joda had been invited to share it with her
household. Dane wondered what Dravash had found to say to her; all through the
battle, her servants had later reported, she and the Sh'fejj stranger "from Raife"
had been closeted in her carriage, talking endlessly.
Dane was meditating over his own attempts to strike up a conversation with the ape-
men; the creatures were a little smarter than a chimpanzee, Dane decided, but not
much. And at that he might be wronging the monkey tribe.
Dane himself would have preferred to sleep in the open but that, he knew, would
have been strange behavior indeed. The natives of this planet, according to one of
the tapes Dane had studied, held a firm belief that the night sky was the abode of
millions of demons, all hungry and malevolent. Dane supposed it was inevitable on a
planet as thickly forested as this one, where the night sky was rarely visible through
the trees, that the natives should regard the stars in the same way they regarded the
eyes that clustered inside the forest at night, regarding their fire.
Besides, the tent kept out rashas.
The evening meal was cooking, separate meals for humans and protosaurians. Dane
stood at the door of the tent, beside Rianna, sniffing hungrily at the delicious odor of
a roast haunch of ganjir turning over a fire, and trying hard not to smell whatever
incredible mess was being cooked for the Honorable Mother and the two travelers
she had invited to be her guests. Dane was sure they hadn't really preserved the
camp's garbage for a few weeks to let it ripen, and were cooking it all up now as a
choice insectivore tidbit; it only smelled that way. When the smell had reached
Aratak, his eyes had actually glistened in anticipation; so he wished Aratak and
Dravash a good appetite it could hardly be worse than raw bug but he wanted
nothing more than to move out of range of the smell.
He heard a cough, and turned to see the caravan-master approaching. Dane was
surprised; he had expected the old man to go on avoiding them.
"Your pardon," the old man muttered, his eyes dropping away from Rianna,
"but you are travelers; has either of you, perchance, ever seen a blade such as
this? It is a wholly new weapon to me; I thought, perhaps, in your travels___"
He held out a long-bladed knife. The weapon was different from any Dane had ever
seen; as he took it in his hands, trying to envision the kind of wound it would make,
Dane felt a sudden dislike and revulsion for anyone who would use such a blade
even in hunting, let alone in combat, against any living being.
It seemed more like a shovel than a knife, like a V in cross-section, an open
equilateral triangle that gave it three sharp edges. They all drew together, at the
point, in jagged, almost microscopic saw-teeth. Worse still, the surfaces were
pebbled, like a rasp.
It was not the clean efficiency of a killing weapon. It was a torturer's blade, designed
for tearing living flesh asunder in little bits. Oh, it would kill -but the barbs, the
pebbling, the dished center of the V these were redundant in a killing weapon.
They were meant only for causing pain.
"Let me see that," Rianna said sharply, and Dane handed it to her, his face twisting
in loathing. His eyes fell on the handle. It was neither wood nor bone, and certainly
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r r
not any metal Dane knew. It could have been some kind of plastic, or ceramic metal
. . . nothing you'd expect to see on a barbarian world!
"Kirgon!" Rianna whispered, half aloud. "Dane, Dravash has to see this, right
away." She called into the tent, and the Captain and Aratak came out, as she turned
to the caravan-master again.
"Where did you get this?" she demanded. Her voice was sharp, angry, and he
reacted to it, almost defensive.
"Off a bandit's corpse, where else? Do they make such blades in Raife, then? If so, I
do not admire them!"
Rianna shook her head, no. "Not in Raife. Farther away than that oh, much
farther. But once I saw such a blade as this, only once."
Firelight gleamed on Dravash's needle fangs as he looked up.
"Kirgon work, without a doubt."
Rianna demanded, "But what is it doing here? How did it come into the hands of a
common bandit?"
The caravan-master demanded, "Do you know the land from which this blade
comes?"
Dravash weighed his answer for a long time, before he spoke.
"No one can tell you that, venerable sir. Yet I have known of raiders who come from
very far away, bearing such blades. I cannot tell you the name of the land from
which they come, nor point it out to you upon any map. I can only tell you that they
are said to be evil beyond all imagining."
"Looking upon their blades, I can well believe it," said the caravan-master, "And
when I look upon it, I wonder that the Blessed Ones would allow such creatures to
exist."
"The ways of the Blessed Ones are beyond my fathoming," Aratak said, and the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]