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fascinated by the way the black mirror of the water sometimes broke apart in ripples to reveal a hump-backed shape or a whipping tentacle. Someone had mentioned to him—Yarco, perhaps—that these creatures had lived in many places all over this world before the coming of man, and that this had once been the private hunting lake of the royal family.
    Glancing back, he thought he saw one of the bullies raising his power-gun. Perhaps it was a flinching in anticipation of the impact that made him slip; perhaps the step on which he had placed his weight a second earlier was failing faster than the rest; the air sagged beneath him and struggled to be more than air and was only air and he was plummeting headlong to the hungry water, thirty feet below.

    In the bright, warm room—sealed utterly from the outer world so that no whisper of sound or ray of light might attract a passer-by—Yarco shivered and shivered again. Now and then his teeth escaped his control and chattered aloud.
    From his endless succession of consultations with visitors who came through the door with backward glances and scrutinized the prince carefully before making obeisance, as if suspecting deceit, Luth looked up in irritation.
    “For the love of life, Yarco!” he snapped. “Will you keep your foolishness to yourself?”
    These matters of how strong sentiment is in such a town, what weapons lie in secret armories … Yarco flinched and muttered something which did not carry. Proud beside Luth, Bryda tossed back her dark hair.
    “What’s the matter, you dodderer?” she said. “Speak up if you’ve anything to say!”
    “I feel you have done something evil and dangerous,” Yarco said. “The young Kazan—”
    “Enough!” Bryda cut in. “Have you not heard before from Hego how he fell to his death, manacled and helpless among the beasts of the lake? What are you afraid of?”
    “He made steps in the air,” Yarco said.
    “And could not make them to save himself,” Bryda retorted. But in her fiery eyes Yarco thought he could detect a lurking, shame-faced fear as great as his own. To cover this, she gestured across the room to where Hego stood, his loose-lipped mouth working a little, his huge hands nervously locking and unlocking with each other.
    “I keep thinking of a beak like a giant’s scissors,” Yarco said. “Strong enough to shear through a steel shackle. I keep thinking of a tentacle that could whip a man through the air like a ball batted in a children’s game, to land him bruised and panting in soft mud, but alive. I keep thinking of the hate that a man could bear you for condemning him to such a death. And the power that a black devil could give him to wreak his vengeance.”
    “If there was that power,” Prince Luth said, “the devil would have saved him directly, not by this chain of fantasy you’ve pictured.” But his eyes were shadowed. “Go, he said after a pause. “Your mind is wandering.”
    Yarco pulled his plump body up from his seat. He gave a formal bow to Luth and started towards the door. On the point of leaving, he turned back.
    “It will go badly with this plan,” he said. “I can feel how the wyrds are working.
    “Get out!” Luth roared, half-rising. The door slammed. He sank back in his place, adding with a sidewise glance at Hego, “And no nonsense from you, either. Hear? The man is dead, a worthless Dyasthala thief!”
    He went back to his business of available vehicles, codes, signals for action and means of assembling troops. It was not until near morning that he needed Yarco to answer a question for him and sent Hego up the stairs.
    So it was Hego who found the stout man, lying back on the bed which Kazan had used during his stay in this house, a look of frozen terror on his face and a tiny vial of poison clasped with death’s rigidity in his plump left hand.

VI

    Under the gray sky, the gray people stood passively in a line across the expanse of concrete. The line was meant to be straight,