Then he fell into a defensive crouch, looking to see what damage he'd done. And finally he relaxed, straightened up, stepped back and folded his arms.

Both opponents were on the ground, one clutching his groin and groaning, rocking himself to and fro, and the other choking, sucking at the air, massaging his throat. They'd recover soon enough, but it would be a long time before they'd forget.

For a moment there was a stunned silence, then Lardis began clapping his hands in spontaneous applause. Many of the men with him followed suit, but not Arlek's ex-gang. They sat very quietly, looking anywhere except at Jazz. To them he offered: 'Well, is there anyone else would like to try me?' But there were no takers.

'I leave their punishment to you, Jazz,' Lardis shouted. 'What shall be done with them?'

'You've shamed them enough,' Jazz answered. 'Arlek had his warnings, which he failed to heed. He's paid for that. Now these men have been warned. If it's my choice, then I say leave it at that.'

'Good!' Lardis barked his agreement.

Men at once stepped forward to help their two fallen colleagues to their feet. One of them was a mirror-bearer; he carefully laid his mirror down as he stooped to assist the man with the bruised throat. Jazz glanced at the large oval mirror where it lay face-down, then looked again - then pounced on it.' What?' he gasped. 'What in all the - ?'

Zek had been moving toward him. Now she came flying. 'Jazz, what is it?'

'Lardis,' he called out, ignoring her for the moment. 'Lardis, where did you get these mirrors?' And suddenly, quite out of character, his voice had a breathless, unbelieving quality.

Lardis came over. He was grinning ear to ear. 'My new weapons!' he answered, with something of pride. 'I went to seek out the Dweller - and found him! As a sign of our friendship, he gave me these. Fortunate for you that he did...'

Jazz picked up the mirror, stared incredulously at its backing. 'Fortunate indeed!' he finally got the words out. 'Maybe in more ways than you know.' He licked his lips, looked at Zek for her confirmation that his eyes weren't playing games with him.

She looked at what he held in his suddenly trembling hands and her jaw dropped. 'My God!' she said, very faintly.

For the mirror was unmistakably backed with chipboard, to which some Traveller had attached leather straps. What was more, it bore a manufacturer's label, carrying the embossed legend:

MADE IN THE DDR.

KURT GEMMLER UND SOHN,

GUMMERSTR.,

EAST BERLIN.

14

Taschenka - Harry's Quest - The Trek Begins

Taschenka Tassi' Kirescu was nineteen, small and slim, completely unpolitical and very frightened.

Her skin was a little darker than that of the rest of her family; her eyes were large and very slightly tilted in an oval face; her hair was black and shiny to match her eyes, and she wore it in braids. Tassi's father, Kazimir, whom she hadn't seen since the night they were arrested, had used to explain jokingly that she was a throwback. There's Mongol blood in you, girl,' he'd told her, his eyes sparkling. 'Blood of the great Khans who came this way all of those hundreds of years ago. Either that ... or I don't know your mother as well as I think I do!' Following which Anna, Tassi's mother, would invariably sputter furiously and chase him with whatever she could lay her hands on.

That, of course, had been in the good times, all of a few weeks ago, which now felt like several centuries.

Tassi had known nothing of Mikhail Simonov's real reason for coming to Yelizinka in the Ural foothills; the story she'd heard was that he was a city boy who'd been something of a wild one, that he'd always been getting himself into one sort of trouble or another, until finally he'd been sent logging as a punishment, a penance guaranteed to cool him off. Well, places didn't come much cooler than Yelizinka, not in the winter, anyway; but Tassi wasn't at all sure that Mikhail's blood had been cooled by it. In fact they'd very quickly become lovers, in a strange sort of way. Strange because he'd always been quick to warn her that it couldn't last, and that therefore she mustn't fall in love with him; strange, too, in that she'd felt exactly the same way about it: he'd serve his time here and wipe his record clean, and then he'd move on, probably back to the city, Moscow, and she would find herself a husband from the logging communities around.

The attraction had been the loneliness she'd felt in him, and a contradictory bowstring tension lying just beneath the surface of him. For his part: once, in a dreamy, faraway moment, he'd told her that she was the only real thing in his life right now, that sometimes he felt the entire world and his place in it were just an enormous fantasy. And now she'd been told that he was a foreign spy, which to Tassi had seemed like the greatest possible fantasy - at first. But that had been before they took her down into the Perchorsk Projekt.

Since then... everything had turned into a real fantasy, a horror story, a living nightmare.

Her father had been incarcerated in the cell next door to hers and she knew he had been tortured on a number of occasions. She'd heard it all coming right through the sheet-steel walls. The hoarse, terrified panting, the sharp slapping sounds, his anguished cries for mercy. But there'd been precious little of that last. Then, three days ago, there'd been one especially bad session; in the middle of it, at its height, the old man had screamed... and then, he'd stopped screaming - abruptly. Since when Tassi had heard nothing from him at all.

She couldn't even bear to think what might have happened; she hoped the silence meant that her father was now in a hospital somewhere, recovering; she prayed that's what it meant, anyway.

Almost as bad had been Major Khuv's questioning. The KGB Major had not once laid a hand on her, but she'd had the suspicion that if he did he would hurt her terribly. The awful thing was that she didn't have - didn't know - anything to tell him. If she had then fear on its own would have obliged her to tell it, or if not fear certainly the desire to stop them hurting her father.

And then there had been the beast Vyotsky. Tassi hadn't stood so much in fear of that one as in horror of him. And she had sensed - had known instinctively - that he enjoyed her horror, feeding upon it like a ghoul on rotting flesh! There had been little or nothing sexual about his treatment of her that time when he'd had her photographed naked with him. It had all been done for effect: partly to shame her, underline her vulnerability and make her feel the lowest of the low; partly to show her the power of her tormentor - that he could strip her naked, leer at her and paw her body, while she was incapable of lifting a ringer to stop him - but mainly to aid him in the mental torture of someone else. The sadist Vyotsky had told her that the photographs were for the 'benefit' of the British spy, Michael Simmons, whom she had known as Mikhail Simonov: 'to drive the poor bastard out of his mind!' Plainly the idea had delighted Vyotsky. 'He thinks he's so cool - hah.r he'd said. 'If this doesn't get him boiling, then nothing will!'

The KGB bully was quite mad, Tassi was sure. Even though he hadn't been back to torment her for quite some time now, still she would freeze whenever she heard someone approaching the door of her cell; and if the footsteps should pause... then her breathing would go ragged at once, and her poor heart begin beating that much faster.

It had started to beat that way just a little while ago, but on this occasion her visitor was only Vyotsky's superior officer, Major Khuv.