Maybe none existed. Dangers, of course, but dangers can’t do worse than kill you, and they said in the Vachs, “He cannot respect life who does not respect death.” No, wait, she had met monsters, back in the Empire. Though she no longer quailed at the remembrance of them, she could see they must be crushed underfoot before they poisoned the good beings like Ydwyr and Nicky and Ulfangryf and Avalrik and, well, yes, all right, in his fashion, Morioch…
Wind lulled, tossing her hair, caressing her skin, which wore less clothes than she would formerly have required on this kind of day. Occasionally she tried to call to her the winged creatures she saw, and twice she succeeded; a bright guest sat on her finger and seemed content, till she told it to continue toward its hibernation. To her, the use of her power felt like being a child again—she had been, briefly, once in a rare while—and wishing hard. Ydwyr guessed that it was a variety of projective telepathy and that its sporadic appearance in her species had given rise to legends about geases, curses, and allurements.
But I can’t control it most of the time, and don’t care that I can’t. I don’t want to be a superwoman. I’m happy just to be a woman—a full female, no matter what race—which is what Ydwyr made me.
How can I thank him?
The compound court was deserted when she entered it. Probably all personnel were fraternizing with the ship’s crew. Dusk was falling, chill increased minute by minute, the wind grew louder and stars blinked forth. She hurried to her room.
The intercom was lit. She punched the replay. It said: “Report to the datholch in his office immediately on return,” with the time a Merseian hour ago. That meant almost four of Terra’s; they split their day decimally.
Her heart bumped. She operated the controls as she had done when the nightmares came. “Are you there, Ydwyr?”
“You hear me,” said the reassuringly professional voice he could adopt. By now she seldom needed the computer.
She sped down empty halls to him. Remotely, she heard hoarse lusty singing. When Merseians celebrated, they were apt to do so at full capacity. The curtain at his door fell behind her to cut off that sound.
She held fist to breast and breathed hard. He rose from the desk where he had been working. “Come,” he said. The gray robe flapped behind him.
When they were secret among the torches and skulls, he leaned down through twilight and breathed—each word stirred the hair around her ear—
“The ship brought unequivocal orders. You are safe. They do not care about you, provided you do not bring the Terrans the information you have. But Dominic Flandry has powerful enemies. Worse, his mentor Max Abrams does; and they suspect the younger knows secrets of the older. He is to go back in the destroyer. The probing will leave mere flesh, which will probably be disposed of.”
“Oh, Nicky,” she said, with a breaking within her.
He laid his great hands on her shoulders, locked eyes with eyes, and went on: “My strong recommendation having been overruled, my protest would be useless. Yet I respect him, and I believe you have affection for him yourself. This thing is not right, neither for him nor for Merseia. Have you learned to honor clean death?”
She straightened. The Eriau language made it natural to say, “Yes, Ydwyr, my father.”
“You know your intercom has been connected to the linguistic computer, which on a different channel is in touch with the expedition he is on,” he told her. “It keeps no records unless specifically instructed. Under guise of a personal message, the kind that commonly goes from here to those in the field, you can tell him what you like. You have thus exchanged words before, have you not? None of his companions know Anglic. He could wander away—’lost’—and cold is a merciful executioner.”
She said with his firmness: “Yes, sir.”
Back in her room she lay for a time crying. But the thought that flew in and out was: He’s good. He wouldn’t let them gouge the mind out of my Nicky. No Imperial Terran would care. But Ydwyr is like most of the Race. He has honor. He is good.
Chapter XV
The fog of autumn’s end hid Mt. Thunderbelow and all the highlands in wet gray that drowned vision within meters. Flandry shivered and ran a hand through his hair, trying to brush the water out. When he stooped and touched the stony, streaming ground, it was faintly warm; now and then he felt a shudder in it and heard the volcano grumble.
His Merseian companions walked spectral before and behind him, on their way up the narrow trail. Most of them he could not see, and the Domrath they followed were quite lost in the mists ahead.
But he had witnessed the departure of the natives from camp and could visualize them plodding toward their sleep: the hardiest males, their speaker G’ung at the rear.
That was a position of some danger, when late-waking summer or early-waking winter carnivores might suddenly pounce. (It wouldn’t happen this year, given a tail of outworld observers armed with blasters and slugthrowers. However, the customs of uncounted millennia are not fast set aside.) The Domrath were at their most vulnerable, overburdened with their own weight, barely conscious in an energy-draining chill.
Flandry sympathized. To think that heatsuits were needed a month ago! Such a short time remained to the xenologists that it hadn’t been worthwhile bringing along electric-grid clothes. Trying to take attention off his discomfort, he ran through what he had seen.
Migration—from Ktha-g-klek to the grounds beneath this footpath, a well-watered meadowland on the slopes of Thunderbelow, whose peak brooded enormous over it. Unloading of the food hoard gathered during summer. Weaving of rude huts.
That was the happy time of year. The weather was mild for Talwin. The demoniac energy promoted by the highest temperatures gave way to a pleasant idleness. Intelligence dropped too, but remained sufficient for routine tasks and even rituals. A certain amount of foraging went on, more or less ad libitum. For the main part, though, fall was one long orgy. The Domrath ate till they were practically globular and made love till well after every nubile female had been impregnated. Between times they sang, danced, japed, and loafed. They paid scant attention to their visitors.
But Talwin swung further from Siekh; the spilling rains got colder, as did the nights and then the days; cloud cover broke, revealing sun and stars before it re-formed on the ground; wair and trees withered off; grazing and browsing animals vanished into their own hibernations; at morning the puddles were sheeted over with ice, which crackled when you stepped on it; the rations dwindled away, but that made no difference, because appetite dropped as the people grew sluggish; finally they dragged themselves by groups to those dens whither the last were now bound.
And back to base for us, Flandry thought, and Judas, but I’ll be glad to warm myself with Djana again! Why hasn’t she catted me for this long, or answered my messages? They claim she’s all right. She’d better be, or I’ll explode.
The trail debouched on a ledge beneath an overhang. Black in the dark basaltic rock gaped a cave mouth. Extinct fumaroles, blocked off at the rear by collapse during eruptions, were common hereabouts, reasonably well sheltered from possible lava flows, somewhat warmed by the mountain’s molten core. Elsewhere, most Domrath moved south for the winter, to regions where the cold would not get mortally intense. They could stand temperatures far below freezing—among other things, their body fluids became highly salty in fall, and transpiration during sleep increased that concentration—but in north country at high altitudes, without some protection, they died. The folk of Seething Springs took advantage of naturally heated dens.