“Where Chaikhe is,” murmured Chimele, “I trust that all Ashanome’s affairs will be managed with chanokhia.”

9

“My lord nas kame.”

Aiela came awake looking into the mottled gray face of an amaut, feeling the cold touch of broad fingertips on his face, and lurched backward with a shudder. There was the yielding surface of a bed under his back. He looked to one side and the other. Isande lay beside him. They were in a plaster-walled room with paned doors open on a balcony and the outside air.

He probed at Daniel’s mind and found the contact dark. Fear clawed at him. He attempted to rise, falling on the amaut’s arms and still fighting to find the floor with his feet.

“O sir,” the amaut pleaded with him, and resorted at last to the strength of his long arms to force him back again. Aiela struggled blindly until the gentle touch of Isande’s returning consciousness reminded him that he had another asuthe. She felt his panic, read his fear that Daniel was dead, and thrust a probe past him to the human.

Not dead,her incoherent consciousness judged. Let go, Aiela.

He obeyed, trusting her good sense, and blinked sanely up at the amaut.

“Are you all right now, my lord nas kame?”

“Yes,” Aiela said. Released, he sat on the edge of the bed holding his head in his hands. “What time is it?”

“Why, about nine of the clock,” said the amaut. That was near evening. The amaut used the iduve’s ten-hour system, and day began at dawn.

That surprised him. It ought to be dark in Weissmouth, which was far to the east of Daniel and Tejef’s ship. Aiela tried to calculate what should have happened, and uneasily asked the date.

“Why, the nineteenth of Dushaph, the hundred and twenty-first of our colony’s—”

Aiela’s explosive oath made the amaut gulp rapidly and blink his saucer eyes. A day lost, a precious day lost with Chimele’s insistence on sedation; and Daniel’s mind remained silent in daylight, when the world should be awake.

“And who are you?” Aiela demanded.

The amaut backed a pace and bowed several times in nervous politeness. “I, most honorable sir? I am Kleph son of Kesht son of Griyash son of Kleph son of Oushuph son of Melkuash of karshMelkuash of the colony of the third of Suphrush, earnestly at your service, sir.”

“Honored, Kleph son of Kesht,” Aiela murmured, trying to stand. He looked about the room of peeling plaster and worn furniture. Kleph in nervous attendance, hands ready should he fall. On Kleph’s shoulder was the insignia of high rank: Aiela found it at odds with the amaut’s manner, which was more appropriate to a backworld dockhand than a high colonial official. Part of the impression was conveyed by appearance, for Kleph was unhappily ugly even by amaut standards. Gray-green eyes stared up at him under a heavy brow ridge and the brow wrinkled into nothing beneath the dead-gray fringe of hair. Most amauts’ hair was straight and neat, cut bowl-fashion; Kleph’s flew out here and there in rebel tufts. The average amaut reached at least to the middle of Aiela’s chest. Kleph’s head came only scantly above Aiela’s waist, but his arms had the growth of a larger man’s and hung nearly past his knees. As for mottles, the most undesirable feature of amaut complexion, Kleph’s face was a patchwork of varishaded gray.

“May I help you, sir?”

“No.” Aiela shook off his hands and went out onto the balcony, Kleph hovering still at his elbow.

Weissmouth lay in ruins before them. Almost all the city had been reduced to burned-out shells, from just two streets beyond to the Weiss river, that rolled its green waters through the midst of the city to the salt waters of the landlocked sea. Only this sector preserved the human city as it had been, but there had never been beauty in the red clay brick and the squat square architecture, the concrete-and-glass buildings that crowded so closely on treeless streets. It had a sordid quaintness, alien in its concept, the sole city of an impoverished and failing world. Under amaut care the ravaged land might flourish again: they had skill with the most stubborn ground and their endurance in physical labor could irrigate the land and coax lush growth even upon rocky hillsides, hauling precious water by hand-powered machines as old as civilization in the zones of Kesuat, digging their settlements in under the earth with shovels and baskets where advanced machinery was economically ruinous, breeding until the settlement reached its limit and then launching forth new colonies until the world of Priamos could support no more. Then by instinct or by conscious design the birthrate would decline sharply, and those born in excess would be thrust offworld to find their own way. This was always the pattern.

But, Aiela remembered with a coldness at his belly, in less than two days neither human nor amautish skill would suffice to save the land: there would be only slag and cinders, and the green-flowing Weiss and the salt sea itself would have boiled into steam.

“What do you want here?” Aiela asked of Kleph. “Who sent you?”

Again a profusion of bows. “Lord nas kame, I am bnesychGerlach’s Master of Accounts. Also it is my great honor to serve the bnesychby communicating with the starlord in the port.”

“Khasif, you mean.”

Terror shone in the round face. Lips trembled. All at once Aiela realized himself as the object of that terror: found himself the stranger in the outside, and saw Kleph’s eyes flinch from his. “Lord—they use no names with us. Please. To the ship in the port of Weissmouth, if that is the one you mean.”

“And who assigned you here?”

“ BnesychGerlach, honorable lord. To guard your sleep.”

“Well, I give you permission to wait outside.”

Kleph looked up and blinked several times, then comprehended the order and bowed and bobbed his way to the door. It closed after, and Aiela imagined the fellow would be close by it outside.

The sun was fast declining to the horizon. Aiela leaned upon the railing with his eyes unfocused on the golding clouds, reaching again for Daniel—not dead, not dead, Isande assured him. So inevitably Daniel would wake and he would be wrenched across dimensionless space to empathy with the human, in whatever condition his body survived. His screening felt increasingly unreliable. Sweat broke out upon him. He perceived himself drawn toward Daniel’s private oblivion and fought back; the railing seemed insubstantial.

Isande perceived his trouble. She arose and hurried out to reach him. At her second step from the bed, mind-touch screamed panic. Her hurtling body fell through the door, her hands clutching for the rail. Aiela seized her, straining her stiff body to him. Her eyes stared upward into the sky, her mind hurtling up into the horrifying depth of heaven, a blue-gold chasm that yawned without limit.

He covered her eyes and hugged her face against him, dizzied by the vertigo she felt, the utter terror of sky above that alternately gaped into infinity and constricted into a weight she could not bear. Proud Isande, so capable in the world of Ashanome:to lift her head again and confront the sky was an act of bravery that sent her senses reeling.

Nine thousand years of voyaging—and world-sense was no longer in her. “It is one thing to have seen the sky through your eyes,” she said, “but I feel it, Aiela, I feel it. Oh, this is wretched. I think I am going to be sick.”

He helped her walk inside and sat with her on the bed, holding her until the chill passed from her limbs. She was not sick; pride would not let her be, and with native stubbornness she tore herself free and staggered toward the balcony to do battle with her weakness. He caught her before she could fall, held her with the same gentle force she had lent him so often at need. Her arms were about him and for a brief moment she picked up his steadiness and was content just to breathe.