"It's just as well you realize she does belong to Walt," said Jase. For perhaps the first time since Paul had met him, there was a gentleness in Jase's voice. "She's Finnish, you know - you know where her name comes from?"
"No," said Paul. "No, I don't."
"The Kalevala - the Finnish national epic. Longfellow wrote his Hiawatha poem from it."
"No," said Paul, "I didn't know."
"Kaleva - Finland," said Jase.
(Wind across snow fields. Tinkling among the icicles of a cavern - I knew it the first time, thought Paul.)
"Kaleva had three sons. Handsome Lemminkainen, the art-smith, Ilmarinen, and the ancient Vainameinen." Paul watched Jase with interest; for the first time the drive and rush of the man was gone. He spoke the names of the old legend with the lingering love of a scholar in his voice. " Vainameinen invented the sacred harp - Kantele. And she is a harp, our Kantele. A harp for the hand of gods or heroes. That's why Walt holds her, old as he is, unyielding as he is to anything but his own way of doing things." Jase shook his head across the table. "You may be arrogant, Paul. But even you have to face the fact that Walt's something more than us ordinary men."
Paul smiled a little. Jase, watching him, laughed shortly. Abruptly the Necromancer was his own hard, glittering self again.
"Because you don't think you can be killed," said Jase, "you think you can't be defeated, either!"
Paul shook his head.
"I'm quite sure I can be killed," he answered. "It's the defeat I doubt."
"Why?" asked Jase, leaning forward. Paul was a little surprised to see that the man was seriously asking.
"I don't know. I... feel it," said Paul, hesitantly.
Jase let the breath out through his nose with a faint, impatient sound. He stood up.
"Learn that list," he said. "Burt said to tell you he'd pick you up tonight after you're through at your office, if you weren't otherwise tied up. You might give him a call."
"I will," said Paul, and watched the other man leave, moving lithely and swiftly among the tables of the restaurant.
Burton McLeod, two-handed broadsword with human brain and soul, had become the nearest thing to a close friend Paul could ever remember having in his life. And this just in the past few weeks and months.
McLeod was in his early forties. Occasionally he looked immeasurably older. Sometimes he looked almost boyish. There was a deep, unvarying sadness in him, which was there as a result of the violence he had done, but not as a result of the ordinary reactions.
He did not regret the killing he had done. His conscience saw no reason why an enemy should not die. But deep within him, it saddened him that battle was not sanctified. Surely there had been something right and holy at one time about a fiat field, a fair fight, and a fair death? He would never have thought to ask quarter for himself, and it embarrassed him that the world in which he lived insisted upon the concept of unvarying quarter for all, even for those he regarded as needing killing. He was a kind and gentle man, a little shy with those of the human race he considered worthwhile, in which class, along with Blunt, Kantele, and Jase, Paul was pleased and embarrassed in turn to find himself numbered. His mind was brilliant and he was an instinctive bookworm, and his essential moral code was so innate that there seemed to be a wall between him and any possibility of dishonesty.
Like Paul, his life had been solitary. That might have been part of what drew them together. But a mutual honesty and a lack of ordinary fear played a part, also. It began with Paul being sent for some rudimentary tutoring in unarmed self-defense, as part of his Guild teachings, and went on from there with Paul's and McLeod's mutual discovery that Paul's overdeveloped arm was not amenable to ordinary training, or susceptible to ordinary attack and disablement.
"It's speed that does it," Mc Leod had said, one evening in a gym, after several unsuccessful attempts on his part to lock and hold Paul's arm. "Given speed and leverage, you don't need much La the way of muscle. But you've got the muscle, too." He examined Paul's arm with interest. "I don't understand it. You ought to be slow as a truck. Bui you're as fast or faster than I am."
"A freak," said Paul, opening and closing his fist to watch the muscles in his forearm bulge and retreat.
"That's it," agreed McLeod, without any overtone of comment. "That isn't just an overdeveloped arm. It's just a properly developed, trained arm for somebody six inches bigger than you. Someone rather lean, but in top shape, and about six-seven or so. Was your other arm as long as this one?"
Paul dropped his arm down by his side. To his intense and sudden interest, he saw that the tips of his fingers hung down almost to his kneecap.
"No," he said. "This one wasn't, either."
"Well," said McLeod, shrugging. He began to put on the shirt he had taken off to instruct Paul. "We didn't really work up a sweat. I'll wait until I get home to shower. Buy you a drink?"
"If I can buy the second," said Paul. And that was the beginning of their friendship.
It was late July of the summer that Jase made his call, left the list of the cults and societies for Paul to learn, and the word about McLeod seeing Paul after working hours that evening.
Paul called up the other man from back at the office and agreed to meet McLeod in the bar of the same restaurant where he had had lunch with Jase. He spent the rest of the afternoon running the charts, as the office phrase was, down in the heart of the huge two-hundred-level building that was the core of the world's machinery, actually in the Super-Complex, itself.
This duty was one which everyone on Tyne's staff, including Tyne, had to perform for himself about once a month. The equipment of the Super-Complex was semi-self-adapting. Changes were constantly being made in it to keep it in line with changes being made in the ultimate mechanisms out in the world with which it was in contact and control. Also, within certain limits, it was capable - and exercised that capability - of making changes in itself. Accordingly, everyone on Tyne's staff had the obligation of keeping up their own portfolio of charts and information about the Super-Complex. You started out with a thick sheaf of notices of alteration, and went down among the working levels, checking the actual changes and seeing they were entered in your portfolio. Without these, there might have been a number of shifts in responsibility from one recording, computing, or controlling element to another, and the human staff might have found itself trying to initiate changes through automatic channels that had already been closed.
It was simply the homework connected with the job of being on the World Engineer's staff, the necessary duty of keeping up-to-date in your own field of endeavor.
Nonetheless, in Paul's case he found it to be much more than the routine duty it was supposed to be. Moving about through chance corridors allowed by the mobile units of the Super-Complex itself, surrounded level by level by the impossible intricacies of softly humming and clicking equipment, Paul could now understand why someone like the weak, drug-fogged Malorn could have been pushed over the unstable border of his mind by moving around here. There was life, all right, in this steadily operating maze of understanding and control; Paul felt it certainly and surely. But it was not life in the human sense of the living, and it did not face him directly. Rather, it slid behind the massed equipment, hid in a corridor closed a second before by a unit moving to block a path that had once been open.