There was, pushed up against the plane. The canopy was up. Duun tossed the baggage to a guard, scrambled up the ladder and Thorn hit the treads behind him, hampered by the suit that restrained his limbs, panting when he reached the wing surface and crawled over the side close on Duun's tail. There was a pilot and co-pilot and two more seats in back in a cockpit that hardly looked big enough for the seats up front: Duun trod on one seat and dropped into place in the second, grabbed complicated belts and fastened them, and Thorn slid into the one beside him— belts like the simulator, Plug-ins for the mask hoses between their legs: Duun showed him and rammed it home. "Communications switch," Duun's voice came over the speaker over his ear, and Duun turned a face unrecognizable in an insect-like mask to show him the three way sliding switch and button on the side. The canopy was sliding forward with a whine of hydraulics. The pilot turned his head and made some signal with an uplifted hand to Duun and Duun made one back. The pilot turned around but the co-pilot was handling things: the fans picked up and the plane began to roll out of the building, faster and faster under open, overcast sky, the tires bumping on uneven pavings, the Dsonan skyline to their left unreal as a city windowview.

Faster still. They swung out onto a long expanse of concrete and the engine whine increased. The force slammed them back as the plane made its run and thundered out over the river, pulled a sharp bank and showed 162

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river for a long dizzy moment until the pilot decided to fly rightwise up again.

"Gods," Thorn said. His heart raced as clouds shredded past and still the climb kept up. (Why this fast? Why this sudden? What's Duun up to?)

"How fast can this plane go?"

"Mach two plus if it has to. It's a courier plane— armed, in case you should wonder. And in case you should wonder again, yes, there's a reason. It's problems on the ground I'm worried about. I don't expect trouble, but there's that remote chance. There's a remote chance of trouble even up here. There's a ghota unit over in Hoguni province that's got one of these and I'm worried where its orders come from."

"Ghota? Aren't they guards?"

"Hired. Warrior guild. One of two. The kosan and the ghota. Our friends up front are kosanin. They take one service for life. Ghotanin rent themselves out; you don't trust them until you know how long their contract's for and whether you're the only one paying them. Like one-year wives. They're always hunting for their next advantage. Kosanin won't serve with them. That's why they're in separate units."

"Duun-hatani, I might not know enough!"

"Whatever you do don't lie and don't flinch. No one ever knows enough.

That's all I can tell you now. Two rules. A third. Remember Sheon.

Remember the knife on your pillow. Remember the pebble-game. But always be polite."

* * *

They came screaming in at a runway that jutted out into the sea, braked in a straining effort, and turned sharper than seemed likely toward another collection of buildings and aircraft of all sizes, most small.

And none sleek as their own. "Well," Duun said, "no one's beat us here except the locals and the happen-bys."

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Thorn looked, searching. There were insignia on most of the craft. Some were striped and most were white. A copter waited, rotors turning. "Is that ours?"

"We'll hope it is." Duun's hand gripped his, painfully hard. "Hear me.

From here on there will be no mistakes, Haras-hatani."

A massive building spread across the land beyond the airport. They had it in sight as they came in, a flat sprawl unlike other buildings Thorn knew.

Gray stone. Hatani gray. The guild-hall.

Avenen.

The plane stopped. Engine-sound dwindled, A vehicle whisked up and towed a ladder into place. The canopy slid back, admitting chill wind.

Duun pitched their baggage out into an attendant's hands, climbed out and Thorn followed in haste. (Think, think, watch these attendants, watch everything.)

(Is it all some test? Did Duun lie? Are there really ghotanin after us and would they come here?)

Duun recovered the bundle of their belongings and headed for the copter.

Thorn ran at his heels, mask flapping and the suit impairing his movements. (Watch these people. Watch all of them, watch their hands.) Up the short couple of steps into the copter, the pilot in his place. (Duun's nose is better. He'd smell fear if that man meant trouble, even through all this oil stink.) Thorn fell into his seat beside Duun and belted in as the copter lifted, turned, heaved itself off in its tilted fashion and ground flew along in surreal intimacy after the courier-plane's sun-dazzled altitude.

There was only the illusion of speed. It took long minutes to come gliding over the gray walls, over buildings that looked like a dozen architects had quarreled and each changed the plan.

A landing circle came up on a rooftop. There were men standing near it, gray-cloaked, looking up at them as the copter settled.

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"They're all right," Duun said. "One thing you can believe: no ghota would wear that color here." The rotors slowed and Duun handed Thorn the baggage and climbed out

Thorn dropped off the step and followed Duun out from under the blades.

The copter roared off again, pelting them with dust, fluttering the gray cloaks.

Duun took his helmet off and walked with it under his arm. Thorn managed the bundle enough to get his off and the wind caught his hair, cold and unforgiving. He looked at the five standing there to meet them, handsome men, one he thought was a woman, all in their gray cloaks and black kilts; and he and Duun were disheveled and dangling masks and hoses like two animate machines lately disconnected. They gazed at Duun and at him— for the first time, at him who had no like, at blowing hair and his smooth face in all its strangeness, and he could not read what they thought. That before anything else convinced him where he was. No one but Duun could go so unreadable to him until now.

But these could. These great sprawling buildings were full of those who could, every one.

* * *

"He's more imposing than the pictures would indicate," Tangan said, a wisp of a man, so old his cheeks were gaunt and even his crest had whitened. The hands clasped in his lap were gaunt and crossed with knife scars, gotten in a youth so long ago it stretched into myth in the Guild, among novices. Duun sat on the white sand which novices had raked into artistic patterns among the five huge rocks which adorned this ancient room. The lights here were electric but that was the only change from the fifth century. Generations of hatani hands had worn these great boulders dark, smoothing them as surely as the river had from which they were taken. Generations of irreverent novices had sat on them and perched there to do their raking, springing from one to the other and (sometimes, novices being the same in every generation) making it a game, leaping and jumping and thrusting at one another with rake handles.

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Tangan had caught a certain rebel and oftwarned novice in that game, among others. And Duun had rued it. Four ten-days of cleaning the sand by hand. It shocked him, how much this man had aged.

"I've gotten used to his looks," Duun said.

"Have you?"

Duun met Tangan's guarded stare. "I've had near twenty years."

"Twenty years of power beyond any precedent."

"Sixteen hiding on a mountain, in a woods. Five performing unmentionable tasks which teach any man humility. So does dealing with Dsonan."