Does she care nothing,Daniel thrust at his asuthi, for the misery they have caused my people?

Be still,Isande returned through Aiela. You do not know Chimele.

“You look troubled, Daniel.”

“Where do my people fit in this?”

“They are not my concern.”

She means it kindly,Isande protested against his outrage. She means no harm to them.

“What happened to them was your fault,” Daniel said to Chimele. “And you owe us at least—”

Aiela saw it coming, caught his human asuthe by the arm to draw him back; but the idoikkhepained him, a lancing hurt all the way to his side, and that arm was useless to him for the moment. He knew that Daniel felt it too, knew the human angered instead of restrained. He seized him with his other hand.

She has been in the presence of an enemy,Isande sent Daniel. Her nerves are still at raw ends. Be still, be still, o for Aiela’s sake, Daniel, be still.

Daniel’s anger flowed over them both, sorrowing at once. “I’m sorry,” he told Chimele. “but you had no business to harm him for it.”

Chimele gave a slight lift of the brows. “Indeed. But Aiela has a m’melakhiafor you, m’metane-toj,and he chose. Consider that, and consider your asuthi the next time you presume upon my self-restraint. Aiela, I regret it.”

The pain had vanished. Aiela bowed, for it was great courtesy that Chimele offered regret: iduve offended her, and received less. Chimele returned him a nod of her head, well pleased.

“Daniel,” she said then, “do you know the world of Priamos?”

Hate was in his mind, fear; but so was fear for Aiela. He abandoned his pride. “Yes,” he said, “I’ve been there several times.”

“Excellent. You will be provided facilities and assistance. I want maps and names. Is their language yours?”

“It is the same.” The impulse was overwhelming. “Why do you want these things? What are you about to do?”

Chimele ignored the question and turned on Aiela a direct and commanding look. “This is your problem,” she said. “See to it.”

They had come. Set on a grassy plain a hundred lioifrom the river settlements, Tejef knew it, facing toward the east where the sun streamed into morning. Chaganokhhad yielded and Ashanomehad come.

It had been a long silence, unbearably long. Many times he had thought he would welcome any contact with his own kind, even to die. It was a loneliness no m’metanecould understand, save one who had been asuthithekkheand separated, a deep and terrible silence of the mind, a stillness where there were no brothers, no nasithi,nothing. No iduve could bear that easily, to be separated from takkhenes,the constant sense of brother-presence that never ceased, waking and sleeping, the pack-instinct that had been the driving force of his kind since the dawn of the race. From his birth he had it, seldom friendly is its messages, but there, a lodestar about which all life had its direction. It flowed through his consciousness like the blood through his veins, the unity of impulse through which he sensed every mood of his nasithi,their presence, their m’melakhia,his possession or lack of arastiethe.

Now takkheneswas back. He felt them, the Ashanome-pack, who had given him birth and decreed his death; and he knew that if they grew much closer they could sense him, weak in his own single takkhenoisthough he was. The fine hair at the nape of his neck bristled at that proximity; the life-instinct that had ebbed in him quickened into anger.

They were on the hunt, and he their game this time, he that had hunted with them. He could sort out two of the minds he knew best: Khasif, Ashakh, grim and deadly men. Chimele would not have descended with them to the surface of this wretched world: Ashanomewould be circling in distant orbit, and Chimele would be scanning the filthy business in progress on its surface, directing the searchers. One day soon they would find him, and vaikkawould be settled—their victory.

The logical faculty said that he might win something even now by surrendering, cringing at Chimele’s feet like a katasathe.She would kick him aside and the nasulwould close on him and maul him senseless, but they would not likely kill him. His life thereafter would be lived from that posture, a constant terror, being forever the recipient of everyone’s temper and contempt. It would gradually take the heart from him: the takkheneswould overwhelm all his instinct to fight back and he would exist until he was finally mauled to death by some nasin katasakke,or starved, or was cast out during akkhres-nasulibecause the takkhenesof neither nasulrecognized him as theirs. Such were the things that awaited the outcast, and a long shiver of rage ran up the muscles of his belly, for he had his bearings again. Arastietheforbade any yielding. He would end under their hands, literally mauled to death if they could get him within their reach, but they would feel the damage he could do them. Ironically, Tejef, who until now had lacked the will to be drawn into a confrontation with any of the wretched humans the amaut used for prey on this forsaken world, began to lay plans to work harm on Ashanomeand to end his life with chanokhia.

His resources were few, a miserable and war-tom world where earth-hungry amaut plundered a dying human population, a human species that had gone mad and that now furnished mercenary troops to the brutish amaut for the final pillage of their own world. Such madness, he reflected, would have been understandable had it been a matter of nasul-loyalty among these humans, but it was not. They knew no loyalties, committed arrhei-nasulat the simple exchange of goods or silver, engaged in katasakkeand then slaughtered the females, who were pathetic and ineffectual creatures. They gathered no young in this fashion, and indeed slaughtered what young they did find—comprehensible, at least, if there had been nasithitakin these human warbands. There were not, and the ultimate result seemed to be suicide for the entire species. Tejef had long since ceased to be amazed by the final madness of this furious people: perhaps this savagery was an instinct no longer positive for survival—it was one that the amaut had certainly turned to their own advantage. Now perhaps there was a way to turn it to the advantage of Tejef sra-Sogdrieni, a means to vaikkaupon Ashanome,one that would deserve their respect when they killed him.

The night was warm. A slight breeze blew in through the protective grille of the window and rippled through the drapery behind the bed. The moonlight cast restless shadows of branches on the wall.

One of the dogs began to bark, joined by the others, and the child in the bed stirred, sat upright, eyes wide. She listened a moment, then turned on her knees so that she could lean against the headboard and the sill and look out into the dark. Now the dogs were off at the distance, perhaps chasing some night-wandering bounder through the fields. Their cries echoed among the rocks in which the house was set, secure behind its stone wall and steel gate, with the cliffs towering up on either side.

In Arle’s estimation this house was an impenetrable fortress. It had not always needed to be so. The wall and the gate were new, and when she was nine the men had not gone with guns to work the fields, and there had been no guards on the heights. But the world had changed. She was ten now, and thought it settled that she would never again walk to the neighbors’ house to play, or even go out the gates to the fields and the orchard without one of her brothers to attend her, rifle over his arm, checking with each of the sentry stations along the way. The family had not been to church in the valley in months, nor valley market, and no one mentioned school starting. This was the way the world had become. And they were fortunate—for there were rumors of burnings downland at the mouth of the Weiss, that very same sleepy river that rolled through their valley and made the crops grow, and made Upweiss the best and richest land on all Priamos.