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heap, but rose on one knee, holding up his red sword.
    “Base! Oh, basely done!” cried out the knight. ‘And will you fight me with a spear, I who have no equal weapon, but only sword in hand? Grant me quarter long enough to rise to my feet!”
    “Where was all this chivalrous talk when you were about to trample me?” shouted Galen. And he stabbed with his spear, a long lunge, guiding the blow with one hand and imparting power to the thrust with his other, as he had been taught.
    The Red Knight, rising to his feet, parried the blow once and twice with his smoking sword, but could deliver no counterthrust, as the length of Galen’s spear put him beyond reach.
    The Red Knight strode hugely forward, lashing with short, narrow sweeps of his sword at Galen’s swiftly darting spear. Sparks from the sword fell across splinters and gouges the sword shaved from the spear shaft, but it had not caught on fire yet. Galen was forced to step backward and backward to maintain the advantage of his reach; but he could not retreat for long, for the still-smoking rocks of the graveyard were behind him.
    When Galen stabbed right, the Red Knight parried with his sword; when he stabbed left, the knight’s shield deflected the blows.
    Galen, in anger and impatience, called out, “Excalibur! Galatine! Balmung! Nothung! I call upon the Four Kings of All Swords to curse this blade opposing me!”
    The Red Knight’s blade shattered in his gauntlet with a crack like thunder. As the fragments dropped from the broken sword hilt, Galen drove a blow through the knight’s guard on the right and struck him in the throat. His gorget was riven in; Galen’s glowing spearpoint pierced the chain links of his coif; the knight spat blood and fell prone.
    “Cowardly, traitorously, and unknightfully struck! Know ye that I am the Son of the Guardian of Tirion. My blood is from the race of Yudhishthira, most just of men, who was the son of Cosmic Law. That Law I call upon to work my dying curse, which else, had you been chivalrous, could not have touched you: your life is forfeit before the sunset of this day!”
    But the Red Knight’s voice was not coming from his body, which lay still, facedownward, in a spreading pool of blood, but from a point in midair above it.
    Galen stood above the corpse, mopping his face with his lambrequin. “I shall not fear your curse, ghost, for I know the arts to banish shadows . . .” but the words came out more uncertainly than he would have liked.
    He performed the ceremonies to allay the ghost, pouring out the wine, putting the proper herb into the corpse’s mouth, coins upon his eyes, and laid great stones over the body to restrict it. In the graveyard were many loose stones and crosses and fragments of cups and other things he needed for this purpose.
    It was now midmorning, and Galen could see, in the distance, the citizens of Tirion emerge onto the streets, wearing wide-brimmed hats and carrying parasols, garbed in robes of lightest silk.
    By noon the sun had dwindled and passed into the far west, a small, dim dot riding among gathering clouds, and Galen had traveled through the outer suburbia, and reached the city gates.
    The citizens, in this cooler time, were now wearing long coats; and the women going to the fountains, carrying tall jars upon their heads, hid their legs in long, flowing skirts of many colors.
    One of these women, with polite words, proffered him a drink from her jar, which he took, sluicing his scarf and cleaning some of the smoke and stain from his armor. With a quiet laugh, the woman warned him not again to be caught by the power of the dawn.
    Her words seemed ominous to Galen. “And what about the sunset?”
    She smiled again and shook her head. “No citizen of Tirion has ever seen the dusk, for twilight fades to night here by imperceptible degrees. Before you is the Gate of Noon, with an Eye as bright as the Eye of Day. Whether you can pass that gate and live, we shall yet discover. But