“You stand alone –” He spoke those words in Galactic, his tone level. “Your kind have blown themselves up back there, Bister. There is no ship waiting to take you from Arzor. Alone – alone – one among the many who hate you. Never shall you see your home world again! It is lost among the nameless stars.”
He knew in that same burst of understanding why the Xik had destroyed Terra – they had hoped to kill the heart of the Confederacy with that one bold stroke. But because the races bred on Terra differed, because her colonies were already mutating from their original breed, that scheme had failed.
“Alone!” He flung that single word with an upthrust of his Singer voice, trying to put into it the power he had felt when facing the Nitra wizard. Bister was alone, and so was Storm. But in this moment the agony of the old loss was dulled for the Terran. He could use that taunt as a weapon, and it carried no backlash to tear him in return.
“Alone!” He could see Bister’s eyes, dark, wide, and he saw, too, that small flame of desperation deep in them. Beneath his aper disguise the Xik was stirring. Storm must bring that alien up to the surface, set the buried self to struggling against the disciplined outer shell.
“No one to back you here, Bister. No cell brothers, no battle mates. One Xik left alone on Arzor to be hunted down –”
All the scraps of briefing the Terran had heard concerning the invaders and their customs came flaming into his mind, clear, distinct, lying ready to his use, as his feet circled in the motions of the duel.
“Who will cover your back, Bister? Who will raise the name shout for you? None of your brothers shall know where you died or mark your circle on the Hundred Tablets in the Inner Tower of your clan city. Bister shall die and it shall be as if he never lived. Nor will he have a name son to take up his Four Rights after him –”
Coll Bister’s mouth hung open a little and there was the glisten of moisture on his forehead, shiny on his cheeks and jaw. That alien spark in his eyes grew stronger.
“Bister shall die and that is all. No awakening for him by the Naming of Names –”
“Yaaaaah!”
The aper charged. But Storm had been warned by a momentary tenseness in his enemy’s body. He swerved with much of his old spontaneous grace. The other’s blade caught in the silver necklace on the Terran’s breast, scored stingingly across his chest. And the force of Bister’s body striking his drove Storm back to the very edge of the ledge.
For fear of being forced over the drop Storm grappled, knowing his danger. The aper was unwounded, strong enough to crush the Terran’s resistance. Storm could only use all the tricks of Commando fighting that he knew. One of them brought him out of that grip and reeling back to safety under the undercut.
Bister gave a shrill whine. His eyes were nonhuman now, filled only with the fear and loss Storm had hammered into his alien brain. Every belief that had bolstered his kind when they went into battle had been ripped to tatters by an enemy he hated above all others. He lived only for one thing now – to kill – not caring if his own death was the price he must pay for success.
And because he had slipped over the edge of sanity he was more dangerous and yet easier to handle. Storm backed and Bister followed, his crooked fingers grasping at the air before him.
Storm raised his own hand, flat, ready. Then he pivoted and what he had worked for happened. Bister blundered into the direct beam of the torch. For a moment his crazed eyes were blinded and Storm’s blow landed, clean and unhurried, as he might have delivered it on the drill field.
The aper gave a light cough that was half grunt and collapsed slowly forward, going to his knees, and then on to his face, to lie unmoving. Storm reeled back until his good shoulder met rock and he was supported by it. He watched Surra creep, her belly fur brushing the ledge, to sniff at Bister. She snarled and would have raised a paw with claws ready to rake, but the Terran hissed an order at her.
Brad Quade crossed the path of the light, knelt beside the aper. He turned the man over, felt for a heartbeat beneath the torn shirt.
“He is not dead.” Storm’s voice was thin and faraway even in his own ears. “And he is truly Xik –”
He saw Quade rise quickly, come toward him. Tired as he was, the Terran could not bear to have the other touch him. He drew away from the wall, to avoid Quade’s outstretched hand. But this time his will did not command his body and he crumpled, one hand falling across Bister’s inert body as he went down.
The picture had been part of Storm’s dreams. Yet now that he opened his eyes and lay without strength to move on the narrow bed, it was still there, covering one wall with a bold sweep of colours he knew and loved. There were the squared mesa of the south-western desert on his own world, above that the symmetrical rounded cloud domes first developed by Dineh painters when they worked with sand as their only material. And there was a wind blowing about that mesa. The Terran could almost feel it as he saw the hair of the painted riders whipped about their faces, the manes of their spotted ponies pulled across their eyes. The mural covered the wall beside his bed and Storm slept with his head turned toward it so that those riders in the wind were the first thing he saw when he had strength enough to raise his heavy eyelids. The artist who had created that scene had ridden in the desert winds of home, been torn by their force, had known well the scent of wool and sage, of twisted pine, and the dull, sun-heated sand. To watch that painting was like waking under the pine tree in the cavern of the gardens, and yet this was more closely Storm’s than the tree, the grass, the flowering things of his lost earth. Because this was a thing of beauty brought to life by one of his own blood. Only an artist of the Dineh could have pictured this –
The painted wall was far more real to him just then than those who came to tend his body. For Storm, the medic from the port and the silent, dark-faced woman who came and went were both shadows without substance. Nor was he able to emerge from his picture-world to answer Kelson’s questions when the Peace Officer had appeared beside his bed – the Arzoran was far less distinct to Storm than the nearest spotted pony. He did not know where he was, nor did he care. He was content to share his waking hours and his longer periods of dreaming with the riders on the wall.
But at last those periods of wakefulness grew longer. The dark woman insisted upon piling pillows to bolster his shoulders, lifting him so that he could not watch the wall in comfort. And he realized that she spoke to him shortly, even sharply, in the Dineh tongue, as one might who was impatient with a child proving stubborn. Storm tried to cling to his languid dreams – only to have them torn from him abruptly when Logan limped in. The mask of bruises had faded from the other’s face, so that Storm traced there something more than just the signature of Dineh blood, a teasing resemblance to a memory he could not quite recall.
“You like it?” The younger Quade looked beyond Storm to the mural, that section of Terran desert, untamed, but captured for all time on an Arzoran wall.
“It is home –” Storm answered truthfully and knew how revealing both words and tone were.
“That is what my father thinks –”
Brad Quade! Storm’s right hand moved across the blanket that covered him, its thin brownness crossing one familiar stripe to the next. His covering was Na-Ta-Hay’s legacy, or if not, one enough like it to be its twin. Na-Ta-Hay and the oath he had demanded of Storm – and Brad Quade’s death lay at the core of that oath.