Then Zek had spoken up: 'That's gloomy talk, Lardis Lidesci. Is something bothering you? We've just one more sundown ahead of us, and before the next one we'll be meeting up with the Dweller. That's what you promised your people. Surely all's gone well so far?'

He'd nodded. 'So far, aye. But the Lord Shaithis has a score to settle. There was no bad blood before. It was the old game of wolf and chicken, as always. But now the chicken has clawed the wolf's nose. He's not just curious or greedy any more, he's angry! Also - ' and he'd closed his mouth and shrugged.

Tell us the worst of it, Lardis,' Jazz had urged him. 'What's on your mind?'

Again Lardis's shrug. 'I don't know - maybe it's nothing. Or maybe it's several small things. But there's a mist back there, and that's something I don't like for a start!' He'd pointed back the way they'd come. In the distance, to the east, a wall of grey mist rolled down from the mountains, coiled itself shallowly on the forests. It swirled and eddied, lapping like a slow tide over the foothills. The Wamphyri have a way with mists,' Lardis had continued. 'We're not the only ones who cover our tracks...'

'But it's still sunup!' Jazz had protested.

'In a very little while it will be sundown!' Lardis had snapped. 'And the great pass has been in darkness for a long time now. Here in the lee of these forests, there's shade aplenty.'

Zek's hand had flown to her mouth. 'You think Shaithis is coming? But I've sensed nothing. I've been scanning constantly but I've read no alien thoughts.'

Lardis had breathed deeply, more a sigh. That's reassuring, anyway. And if he is coming, we'll meet on our terms at least.' He'd glanced up into the mountains. 'But the wolves were howling, and now they've stopped. And our own animals are quiet, too. See - only look at Wolf, there!' Zek's great wolf loped a little way apart; his ears were flat and his tail brushed the rough ground. Every now and then he'd pause and look back, and whine a little.

Jazz and Zek had looked at each other, then at Lardis. 'But maybe it's nothing,' the Gypsy leader had grunted. And with another shrug he'd gone on ahead.

'What do you make of all that?' Jazz now asked Zek, his tone soft.

'I don't know. Maybe it's just as he said. Anyway, the closer we get to sundown, the more nervy everyone becomes. There's nothing new in that. The Travellers don't like mists, and they like their animals frisky. Anything else is a bad sign. The current mood: it's just a combination of things, that's all.' For all her brave explanation, she hugged herself and shivered.

'Ever the optimist?' Jazz's smile was uncertain.

'Because I've come through a lot,' she was quick to answer. 'And because we're so close to the end now.'

'Yes, you have been through a lot.' Jazz began hauling the travois again. 'And come to think of it, you never did get round to telling me how come the Lady Karen let you go.

'We've been busy,' she shrugged. 'Do you still want to hear it?' Suddenly the idea appealed to her. Maybe talking would calm her own nerves a little.

'Yes,' Jazz said, 'but first there are a couple of other things that have been bothering me.'

'Oh?'

'Anachronisms,' he nodded. 'The Gypsies, this Romance-language tongue of theirs, their metal working. Unless there's a lot of this planet I don't know about -and I can't see how that can be, for one side's hot enough to fry eggs and the other would freeze you stiff - then these things I've mentioned are anachronisms. This world is ... well, it's primitive! But there are paradoxes. Some of the things in this world ... by comparison they're high-tech!'

Zek's turn to nod. 'I know,' she said, 'and I've thought about it. If you talk to the Travellers about their history, their legends, as I have done, you might find an explanation. Something of one, anyway. According to immemorial sources, their world wasn't always like this. Wamphyri legends bear the Traveller myths out, incidentally.'

Jazz was interested. 'Go on,' he said. 'You talk and I'll save my breath for hauling.'

'Well, the Traveller legends have it that once upon a time this planet was fertile in almost every region, with oceans, ice-caps, jungles and plains: much like Earth; in fact. And it teemed with people. Oh, it had its vampire swamps, too, but they weren't so active in those days. People knew about them and shunned them; local communities drew boundaries and patrolled them. Nothing living was ever allowed out. Vampirism was treated like rabies, the only difference being that if a man was ever vampirized they didn't attempt a cure. There is no cure. So they'd simply stake him out and... you know the way it goes...

'But in the main the vampires were kept down, and in those days there were no Wamphyri. The people weren't migratory; they had nothing to fear and so nothing to run from; their systems were mainly barter, less frequently feudal.

'Anyway, as far as I can make out they were maybe three to four hundred years behind us. There were big differences, of course: they hadn't discovered gunpowder, for one thing. Also, while they'd developed a complex language, they still hadn't made much effort to get it down on paper - or on skins. That's why most of this has had to come down by word of mouth, from one generation to the next. Of course, you can get big distortions that way: some unimportant things get exaggerated while others of real importance are lost entirely. For example, the heroes in the Traveller myths are all giants, who eat vampires for breakfast and don't even get a stomach ache! But no one remembers who developed the metalworking skills, designed the first caravan, made the first crossbow.

'So that was the way this world was: like ours maybe three or four hundred years ago, but in many ways less dangerous, less warlike, less noisy. Mainly people lived in peace with each other, and apart from small territorial disputes they were left alone to farm, fish, and trade off anything extra which they managed to produce. There have been plenty of worse places, and worse times, in our own world.

'Oh, and perhaps I should mention: in that bygone time the world did have proper seasons, shorter days and nights, again pretty similar to our own planet. But then -

Then something happened.

'According to the Traveller legend, a "white sun" appeared in the night sky. It came through the heavens so fast it looked like a bar of fire; it glanced off the moon, speared down and blazed across the surface of the world! As it fell so it shrank, until finally it skimmed across the land in a huge ball of fire, like a flat stone bouncing on water, and came to rest back there beyond the mountains.

'But though it was small, this "white sun", its magic was enormous. It speeded up the moon in its orbit, changed the world's axis, brought into being geological stresses of awesome magnitude. It created these mountains, the frozen lands to the north, the deserts of the south. And for a thousand years after its coming, the surface of this world was more like hell than the friendly place it had been.

The seasons were gone forever, the moon was now a demon flyer that called to the wolves, an estimated quarter-billion people were reduced to a few thousand. The continents had changed, mountains disappeared from where they'd been, were forced up elsewhere; the survivors went through a nightmare of tidal waves, storms, volcanic upheavals - you name it. But they learned to live with it, and eventually the world settled down. Except that now there was a Starside and a Sunside.

'Centuries passed. Who knows how many? Far Sunside became a desert, and Starside... well, you've seen it. Only the mountains and their Sunside foothills could support human life as we know it. People had settled there, started to rebuild, however slowly, crudely. They remembered a few of their skills, used them to start afresh. And meanwhile the swamps, mainly unchanged, had re-stocked with evil vampiric life...