Thrr-tulkoj threw a quick look around them. "Well, at least we've some names to work with now."

"For all the good that'll do us," Thrr't-rokik grunted. "It hasn't helped the Overclan Prime's office track them down."

"You assume the Overclan Prime's office wants to track them down," Thrr-tulkoj pointed out. "Remember, Overclan warriors were waiting here ready to pounce as soon as Thrr-pifix-a had her fsss in hand."

"True." Thrr't-rokik flicked his tongue in a grimace. "I wish I'd been able to listen in on that conversation Thrr-gilag had with the Overclan Prime back at the house."

"My guess is that it was unrelated," Thrr-tulkoj said. "We are in the middle of a war, you know."

Abruptly, an Elder flicked into view. "Are you Protector Thrr-tulkoj; Kee'rr?" she said.

"Yes," Thrr-tulkoj confirmed.

"I have a message for you from the Vehicle Registry Department. The transport you specified has an index number of CW-556499 and is currently registered to the Dhaa'rr office of the Overclan Seating."

"Understood," Thrr-tulkoj said. "Thank you."

The Elder flicked her tongue in a five-hundred-cyclic-old Hgg gesture of salute—she must have dated back nearly to the Third Eldership War, Thrr't-rokik realized—and vanished. "So it's a Cvv-family vehicle," Thrr-tulkoj commented. "Interesting."

"Is this the transport I saw Korthe and Dornt escape in?" Thrr't-rokik asked.

Thrr-tulkoj nodded. "I contacted the floater-engine manufacturer and had them look up the identification numbers you were able to read before the transport got out of range. Looks like the trail not only leads to the Dhaa'rr clan, but possibly straight to the Speaker for Dhaa'rr personally."

For a hunbeat neither spoke. Thrr-tulkoj broke the silence first. "We're going to need a lot more proof before we can make this public," he said. "At the minimum we need to track down Korthe and Dornt and establish a connection between them and the Dhaa'rr clan in general or Speaker Cvv-panav in particular."

"That won't be easy," Thrr't-rokik warned. "Speaker Cvv-panav would have to be crazy not to bury them away somewhere."

"Not necessarily," Thrr-tulkoj said, "Remember, as far as anyone knows, the only person who can identify them is Thrr-pifix-a, and she's sitting out here four thousand thoustrides from Unity City. Speaker Cvv-panav might well be arrogant enough to still have them there with him."

"And if he's not?"

"If he's not, then he's probably buried them and the transport in the same place. And particular vehicles are a lot easier to trace than particular Zhirrzh."

"I'll take your word for it. So we start at Unity City?"

"Right. We can take the rail from Reed's Village to the transport field at Pathgate. We should make Unity City by this latearc."

"All right." Thrr't-rokik hesitated. "You realize, of course, that even if you can't recognize them, they can probably recognize you. And they aren't going to want to be found."

5

Lying fully alert on his mattress pad, half seeing, half imagining the protective shelter cloth draped above his head, Lord Stewart Cavanagh stared out into the blackness of the Granparra night, wondering what it was that had awakened him.

His watch, pen torch, knife, and Kolchin's backup flechette pistol were on the ground beside his head to his left. Carefully, he rolled onto his left side, wincing at the ache from a dozen sore muscles.

"Lord Cavanagh?" a quiet voice called from a few meters away.

"Yes," Cavanagh confirmed, snagging the pistol and easing onto his back again. "Sorry—did I wake you?"

"No, I've been awake for a few minutes," Mitri Kolchin said. "I think we've got an intruder."

Cavanagh shivered, the muscle movement sending another wave of aching through him. "I thought you killed everything nearby when we made camp."

"I thought so, too," Kolchin said. "Quiet, please, and let me listen."

Cavanagh grimaced, gripping the pistol tightly as he rested his hand on his chest, breathing as silently as he could. In the darkness he visualized the area around the encampment Kolchin had cleared for them the previous evening, trying to guess where the intruder could be coming from.

And then... "Kolchin?"

"Sir, you have to be quiet—"

"It's over here," Cavanagh told him. "It's moving along my left leg."

He never heard Kolchin get out of his sleeping roll, but suddenly, with a ripple of displaced air, the bodyguard was there beside him. "Hold still," Kolchin murmured. "Watch your eyes."

Abruptly, the shelter was ablaze with light from Kolchin's pen torch. Cavanagh squinted against the glare, his eyes fighting to adjust, and looked down toward the left side of his sleeping roll.

It was there, all right: a slender, segmented greenish-purple vine moving leisurely alongside his leg. Cavanagh didn't recognize the particular species, but like the rest of Granparra's recoil creepers, its tip and sides bristled with barbed thorns. Even as he watched, it moved again, poking mindlessly at the sleeping roll as it tried to get to the source of the heat it was sensing.

"Don't move," Kolchin said quietly. "I'll try to draw it away."

There was a soft hum, and the beam from the pen torch focused down until it was a small, intense spot on the bristling vine head. The creeper seemed to pause, almost as if thinking; and then, as Cavanagh held his breath, the head began to turn toward this new source of heat. "I'll give it a few more centimeters," Kolchin said. "We don't want it twitching back toward you."

Cavanagh gave a microscopic nod, afraid of startling the plant. With what seemed like agonizing slowness the creeper continued veering away from his side....

And then Kolchin's right hand slashed down, the two edges of his split-blade knife slicing vertically into either side of the creeper, pinning the vine head to the ground. The creeper twitched violently and was still writhing as Kolchin slid Cavanagh's knife from its sheath and sliced off the deadly vine head.

Cavanagh took a careful breath, the pistol sagging against his chest as his hand relaxed its rigid grip on the weapon. "It's helpless now, right?"

"Right," Kolchin confirmed. He was working his way down the creeper, methodically cutting through the vine at each of the segment lines and throwing the pieces out into the forest. "Just don't touch the vine head—those thorns are probably poisonous."

"Right," Cavanagh said, reaching gingerly past the still writhing vine head for his watch. Still two hours to dawn. "When did Piltariab say he'd be getting back from Puerto Simone Island?"

"Sometime this morning," Kolchin said, coming back from his search-and-kill defoliation exercise and returning Cavanagh's knife to its sheath. Squatting down, he carefully pulled his own knife out of the ground, the twitching vine head still impaled on the split blade. With a quick flick of his wrist he flipped the knife around, sending the vine head spinning out into the darkness of the forest. "He wouldn't commit himself more precisely than that."

"In my experience it's a minor triumph to get an Avuire to commit to even a given day," Cavanagh said, easing himself up on one elbow and peering ahead into the darkness. A couple of kilometers away out there was Sereno Strait, the narrow stretch of water that separated them here on the Granparra mainland from the safety of Puerto Simone Island. Ninety-nine-plus percent of the planet's forty million people lived on the island, dwelling in the literal shadow of the huge Parra vine but protected by their isolation from the rest of the planet's deadly plant life.

Cavanagh and Kolchin, unfortunately, were out here.

None of this had been part of the original plan, of course. Breaking away from Petr Bronski on Mra-mig, they had borrowed a small fighter ship from the Mrach weapons dump in the hills outside Mig-Ka City—the only craft there that could be prepped for flight in under half an hour—and had headed off-planet. The idea was to leave Mrach space as quickly as possible and get back to Cavanagh's homeworld of Avon, where he could set to work on something that could help the Commonwealth defeat the invading Conquerors.