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murmur which is, perhaps, the first thing a Terran on a hostile world learns to identify.
    One of the four Terran guards, hearing the movement, tensed and moved his hand closer to his weapon. It wasn't a threatening movement, just an automatic one, just close enough that he felt reassured that the weapon was there if he needed it. But the prisoner said, "No." The Terran shrugged and said, "Your neck, sir," and let his hand fall.
    Walking at the center of the close drawn guard, Regis listened to the muttering and knew it was directed as much at him as at the Terrans guarding him. He thought wryly, do these people think I like this? Do they think I enjoy it? I've made myself virtually a prisoner in my own house just to avoid this kind of display, the shame of our world; a Hastur of Hastur no longer dares to walk free in his own streets. It's my life I'm giving up, my freedom, not theirs. It's my children, not theirs, growing up with Terran armed guards standing around their nurseries. I am so constantly reminded that a bullet, a knife, a silk cord or a single poison berry in their supper can mean the end of the Hastur line forever.
    And what will they say when they hear that Melora, bearing my child, is being sent to the Terran Medical for her confinement? I can hear it now. I've tried to keep it secret, but I had enough trouble persuading her family, and these things leak out. Even if there had been much between us, this would have ended it. Melora wouldn't even speak to me when I visited her last, and the trouble is, I don't blame her. She just stared coldly over my head and told me that she and all her family were obedient as always to the will of Hastur. And I knew that such little love or kindness as there had been between us, for a few months, was gone forever.
    It would be so easy to damn all women, but I must remember that the ones who love me are under an infernal strain—and that's been true of the women unlucky enough to love a Hastur, all the way back to the legend of the Blessed Cassilda herself, my hundred times great-grandmother—or so the story says.
    And not the least of the strain they're under is this damned self-pity!
    He sighed and tried to grin and said to Danilo, walking beside him, "Well, now we know how the freak at Festival Fair must feel."
    "Except that we don't get our porridge and meat from having to listen," Danilo muttered.
    The crowd was parting to let them through. As they stepped toward the special transit plane, Regis felt, deep inside the crowd, someone with a hand raised. A stone thrown? At him, at his Terran guard? He could hear the angry thoughts:
    "Our lord, a Hastur, prisoner of the Terrans?"
    "Has he asked them to cut him off from his people this way?"
    "Slave!"
    "Prisoner!"
    "Hastur!"
    It was a tumult in his mind. The stone flew. He groaned and covered his face with his hands. The stone burst into flame in midair and disappeared in a shower of sparks. There was a little despairing "Ahhh!" of horror and wonder from the crowd. In its backlash and before it could die away, Regis let his bodyguard hustle him up the steps of the special transit plane, dropped into a seat inside and remarked to nobody in particular, "Damn it, I could sit down and howl."
    But he knew it would be repeated all over again: guards, mutterings, crowds, resentments, maybe even thrown stones on the airstrip at Arilinn.
    And there wasn't a thing he could do about it.
     
    Far to the east of Trade cities and Terrans, the Kilghard Hills rise high, and beyond them the Hyades and the Hellers; layer on layer of mountain ridges, where men and nonmen live in the deep wooded slopes. A man afoot could travel for months or live a lifetime, and never come to the end of the woods or the ranges.
    A gray and rainy dawn was breaking over a morning of disaster as a group of men, wrapped in tattered, cut and smoke-scorched furs, dragged themselves downhill toward the ruins of a village. The walls of a stone house still stood,