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time much to my displeasure, another name was also used, and I asked questions and was told. Was told.
    Seg said to me: “We are the Order of Kroveres of Iztar, Dray. Now we must build. This little Island has witnessed a miracle.”
    “Surely,” I said as we rode lumpily for the Mound of Arial. “And you still haven’t given me any idea why we came here in the first place — except to check up on progress.”
    He laughed.
    “Why, you may as well know now. I think Elder Pyvorr will be mourning his son—” All the laughter fled. “It was a great deed, Dredd Pyvorr’s. We shall remember him in the Kroveres.”
    “Yes, that is so. And?”
    “And, my old dom, you were asked here to be given the new name of the island as a gifting. You are the Kov of Zamra. Zamra is just over the horizon to the north, and this little island is called Nikzm—”
    “I know!” Nik as a prefix means half and as a suffix means small. In the names of lands and islands, however, the prefix often carries the meaning of small, for Zamra was by many times more than twice the size of Small Zamra, Nikzamra, Nikzm.
    “The Elders and people of the island have decided and issued the necessary patents and the bokkertu has been concluded to call the island Drayzm. Drayzm. So, my old dom, we are also the Kroveres of Drayzm.”
    So, as you can well imagine, I was not overly pleased.
    I passed it off; but Seg gave me a hard look, and said a word or two about thick-headed, vosk-skulled ingrates, and how Delia was muchly pleased—
    “Did Delia know about this, then?”
    “Oh, aye. You don’t think we’d go behind your back without consulting Delia, do you? You’ve told me how they made you Strom of Valka — well! This is no new title — and I know how you feel about them, as I do. They are useful in this world.”
    “That is sooth, by Vox!”
    And Inch leaned forward to say, waspishly: “And if the Kov of Falinur lost that one, he’d not give a damn, hey?”
    “Too right!” snapped back Seg. He had had great trouble in his kovnate of Falinur. “Except — except Thelda would—”
    “Aye,” I said. “Thelda likes mightily to be a kovneva. And so she should. She deserves it.”
    Inch laughed and chick-chicked his zorca and we rode on. But I began to think how best to relieve Seg of Falinur and find him a kovnate where he was not regarded with hatred, through no fault of his own but because of the ingrained animosity of the people to anyone who deprived them of slaves.
    Then, of course, the problem would arise that the new kov would almost certainly approve of slavery, as did most ordinary men and women of Vallia. Slavery, Delia and I had sworn, was going to be rooted out of Vallia. I looked beyond that, as did Delia, I know now, until it was finally uprooted from all of Paz.
    As we rode back this kind of talk naturally led on to the problems of Vallia, the huge island Empire. Delia’s father, the emperor, had once more gained a breathing space with the destruction of the Chyyanists; but there were always fresh factions seeking to drag him down and install the puppet of their own choice as emperor.
    “Mind you, Dray,” said Seg, reflectively as we cantered gently into a defile ready to begin the last ascent to Arial’s Mound in the last of the suns shine. “The nobles loyal to the emperor remain loyal, or most of them. He couldn’t rule without them.”
    “But the opposition parties still continue, also,” pointed out Inch. “They keep changing alliance and pattern; but they are still against the emperor, the whole family.” Here he looked at me.
    I nodded somberly. Vallia is an enormous patchwork of many different sized estates, run by nobles — by kovs and vads and trylons and Stroms and all the others — and there are many parties and factions, not all of whom seek to destroy the emperor. At this time the main party was the Racter Party, and the second the Panval Party. The Fegters were growing in strength and there was