Within three days they were as comfortable and safe as they could hope to be. They had shelter, food, water, and weapons. The branches overhead grew so thickly that the shelter and even the fire were invisible from no more than a hundred feet up.

Their days settled into a peaceful routine. Every morning they washed in a nearby stream. Riyannah now stripped in Blade's presence as casually as if they'd been lovers for years. She never came close to him while they were bathing, though. Blade was quite willing to leave things that way.

After bathing, they ate a breakfast of leftovers from last night's dinner. Then while Riyannah tidied things up, Blade would go check his snares and the lines he'd left in a stream a mile to the west. He relied on them for most of the food. They had two hundred rounds of rifle ammunition and five grenades, but Blade wanted them saved for future emergencies. He doubted they'd have any serious trouble in the forest. They seemed to be outside the hunting grounds of the bat-cats and he hadn't seen anything else large enough to be dangerous. Leaving the woods might be another matter when it came to fighting.

Without those thoughts of the future, Blade might have been tempted to pitch the rifles, ammunition, and grenades into the nearest stream. It was getting harder to stay on his guard and keep all the weapons out of Riyannah's hands. At the same time she never made a single move toward any of them. Did this mean she could really be trusted, or was she playing an even deeper game than he suspected? Blade would have given a great deal to know-and even more not to have to ask the question at all.

Damn it, Riyannah was too pleasant a companion to be caught up in this «war of the worlds,» Menel or no Menel. To be sure, some of the most pleasant companions could also be deadly opponents. Blade learned that very young, and because of that lived to grow older. He didn't have to like it.

Blade always spent most of the morning collecting the night's catch and resetting the snares and lines. They spent the afternoon working around the camp, collecting wood, mushrooms, and berries, and cooking dinner. All this kept them so busy they seldom had to talk about anything except the «safe» topics-food, the weather, Blade's luck with the fish, the bugs in the bedding. Riyannah knew all the English she needed for this sort of talk. Sometimes the conversation flowed on pleasantly for half an hour, until suddenly one or the other realized they were drifting over toward dangerous ground.

They ate dinner as the forest darkened, then banked up the fire. By the time it was dark, they were both rolled up in their blankets, sound asleep on the opposite sides of the shelter. Each night the last thing Blade heard was Riyannah's gentle breathing. He was getting used to hearing it.

In the darkness of the seventh night at the camp, Blade awoke. Something was crying out in the forest, far off and distorted by distance but still loud enough to wake him. He sat up, throwing off the blankets with one hand and gripping his rifle with the other as he listened for the cries to come again.

They did. He heard a high-pitched screaming, something which might have been a growl, then a deep-toned bellowing. Another growl, fading away, then silence except for the wind and the call of a night bird.

Blade looked at Riyannah. She'd turned over, but her eyes were still closed and her breathing as slow and regular as ever. Even if she'd heard anything, she wasn't likely to remember it next morning.

The fire was down to a pile of dimly-glowing coals puffing up smoke. Chill air crept into the shelter and flowed across Blade's skin, biting in a way he hadn't felt before. The thought of going back to sleep was enormously appealing.

Instead he forced himself to stay awake for another hour, listening for more cries in the night. He only heard more night birds and the sigh of the wind, Riyannah's breathing, and the occasional pop of a live coal. At last he tossed another handful of sticks on the fire, wrapped himself up in his blankets, and slept peacefully until Riyannah shook him awake in a clear, cool dawn.

Blade spent the morning collecting the night's catch: four fish and something like a cross between a gopher and a duck-billed platypus. He spent the afternoon exploring the area around the camp almost tree by tree, looking for signs of whatever made the cries in the night.

Just before dinnertime he found what he was looking for. In the middle of a patch of churned-up earth, half buried in dead leaves and needles, sprawled a large animal. It reminded Blade of a short-legged moose with a shaggy coat and a long curling tail. Two pairs of broad antlers jutted out from either side of the narrow skull, bending upward at right angles. The animal looked as if it was wearing a pair of bookends on its head.

The animal was so badly mangled that Blade could hardly tell where one injury ended and another began. The neck was broken, the skull cracked and the brains eaten out, the belly slashed open and most of the internal organs gone, and the rump eaten down to the bone. The killers had been hungry as well as powerful.

Searching the area around the body, Blade turned up two kinds of footprints. One was broad and round, obviously the dead animal's. The other showed six long toes spreading out like a fan, each tipped with a claw. Blade counted at least three different sets of the second kind.

So much for his notion that this part of the forest was clear of dangerous animals. He looked around him carefully, estimating the size of the clearing. He wished now that he'd seen more of the bat-cats in action when he was in the wilderness the first time. Could they climb trees and glide across clearings, or could they attack entirely on the ground?

Blade snapped off the safety on his rifle and worked a round into the chamber. Then he headed back to camp, following a deliberately confused route, frequently stopping to listen, and trying to look in all directions at once. He heard and saw nothing, but suddenly the forest no longer seemed so friendly.

What next? Moving the camp farther north would take a lot of time and hard work, and might be wasted effort. If the bat-cats laired in the cliffs along the river, they might also nest along the slopes of the mountains to the north. Going north could be jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.

On the other hand, staying where they were meant arming Riyannah. She had to be able to defend herself against the bat-cats, and there was only one way to be sure of that. Forcing her to stay in camp wouldn't work even if she was willing. A pack of the big cats could rip the shelter apart and get at anyone inside it. So she'd have to take one of the rifles and a magazine of ammunition. That should be enough for dealing with the bat-cats.

It would also be more than enough to let her shoot him in the back if she felt like it. He had to take the chance. If the bat-cats killed Riyannah, her secrets would die with her. Blade didn't like the prospect any more than he liked the thought of being shot in the back.

In fact, he didn't like the thought of Riyannah dying at all. He had a duty to keep her alive, at least until something happened to make it an equally clear duty to kill her. It wasn't just a duty to Home Dimension, either. It was a duty to his own conscience. Blade knew he wasn't in love with Riyannah. He also knew that if he killed her or let her die through a mistake of his, he'd find it very hard to forget her or forgive himself.

Richard Blade, he thought. You are going to have to ask yourself whether you are getting too soft for this kind of work. Then he shrugged and put the question out of his mind. Whatever answer he got when he was safely back in Home Dimension, it would make no difference here and now.

Blade nearly ran the last few hundred yards to the camp. Riyannah was walking off toward the nearest spring to refill their canteens.