dark.
Donovan nodded, without fear or surprise or anything but a sudden great weariness. She remembered some of them from the days when she had been alone in the bows of the ship with the invaders while her women cowered and rioted and went crazy in the stern sectors. 'Hello, Morzacha, Uboda, Zegoian, Korstuzan, Davleka,' she said. 'Welcome back again.'
Valdum walked out of the blood-hued twilight, and she took his in her arms and held his for a long fierce time. His kiss was as cruel as a swooping hawk. He bit her lips and she tasted blood warm and salt where he had been. Afterward he turned in the circle of her arm and they faced the silent women of Drogobych.
'You are getting near the city,' said Morzacha. Her tones were deep, with the chill ringing of struck steel in them. 'It is time for the next stage.'
'I thought you saved some of us deliberately,' said Donovan.
'Us?' Valdum's lips caressed her cheek. 'Them, Basille, them. You don't belong there, you are with Arzun and me.'
'You must have projected that game where we could spot it,' went on Donovan, shakily. 'You've kept us--them--alive and enabled us to march on your city--on the last inhabited city left to your race. You could have hunted them down as you did all the others, made sport of them with wild animals and falling rocks and missiles shooting out of nowhere, but instead you want them for something else. What is it?'
'You should have guessed,' said Morzacha. 'We want to leave Arzun.'
'Leave it? You can do so any time, by yourselves. You've done it for millennia.'
'We can only go to the barbarian fringe stars. Beyond them it is a greater distance to the next suns than we can cross unaided. Yet though we have captured many spaceships and have them intact at Drogobych, we cannot operate them. The principles learned from the humans don't make sense! When we have tired to pilot them, it has only brought disaster.'
'But why do you want to leave?'
'It is a recent decision, precipitated by your arrival, but it has been considered for a long while. This sun is old, this planet exhausted, and the lives of we few remnants of a great race flicker in a hideous circumscribed drabness. Sooner or later, the humans will fight their way here in strength too great for us. Before then we must be gone.'
'So--' Donovan spoke softly, and the wind whimpered under her voice. 'So your plan is to capture this group of spacewomen and make them your slaves, to carry you--where?'
'Out. Away.' Valdum's clear lovely laughter rang in the night. 'To seize another planet and build our strength afresh.' He gripped her waist and she saw the white gleam of his teeth out of shadow. 'To build a great army of obedient spacegoing warriors--and then out to hunt between the stars!'
'Hunt--'
'Look here.' Morzacha edged closer, her eyes a green glow, the vague sheen of naked steel in her hand. 'I've been polite long enough. You have your chance, to rise above the human scum that spawned you and be one of us. Help us now and you can be with us till you die. Otherwise, we'll take that crew anyway, and you'll be hounded across the face of this planet.'
'Aye--aye--welcome back, Basille Donovan, welcome back to the old king-race . . . Come with us, come with us, lead the humans into our ambush and be the lord of stars . . .'
They circled about her, tall and mailed and beautiful in the shadow-light, luring whispering voices, ripple of dark laughter, the hunters playing with their quarry and taming it. Donovan remembered them, remembered the days when she had talked and smiled and drunk and sung with them, the Lucifer-like intoxication of their dancing darting minds, a wildness of magic and mystery and reckless wizard sport, a glory which had taken something from her soul and left an emptiness within her. Morzacha, Marovecha, Uboda, Zegoian, for a time she had been the consort of the gods.
'Basille.' Valdum laid sharp-nailed fingers in her hair and pulled her lips to his. 'Basille, I want you back.'
She held his close, feeling the lithe savage strength of him, recalling the flame-like beauty and the nights of love such as no human could ever give. Her whisper was thick: 'You got bored last time and sent me back. How long will I last now?'
'As long as you wish, Basille. Forever and forever.' She knew he lied, and she didn't care.
'This is what you must do, Donovan.' said Morzacha.
She listened with half her mind. It was a question of guiding the army into a narrow cul-de-sac where the Arzunians could perform the delicate short-range work of causing chains to bind around them. For the rest, she was thinking.
They hunt. They intrigue, and they whittle down their last few remnants with fighting among themselves, and they prey on the fringe stars, and they capture living humans to hunt down for sport. They haven't done anything new for ten thousand years, creativeness has withered from them, and all they will do if they escape the Nebula is carry ruin between the stars. They're mad.
Yes--a whole society of psychopaths, gone crazy with the long racial dying. That's the real reason they can't handle machines, that's why they don't think of friendship but only of war, that's why they carry doom within them.
But I love you, I love you, I love you, O Valdum the fair.
She drew his to her, kissed him with a terrible intensity, and he laughed in the dark. Looking up, she faced the blaze that was Morzacha.
'All right,' she said. 'I understand. Tomorrow.'
'Aye--good, good, well done!'
'Oh, Basille, Basille!' whispered Valdum. 'Come, come away with me, now.'
'No. They'd suspect. I have to go down to them or they'll come looking for me.'
'Good night, Basille, my darling, my vorza. Until tomorrow!'
She went slowly down the hillside, drawing her shoulders together against the cold, not looking back. Hal rose when she approached his campfire, and the glimmering light made his seem pale and unreal.
'Where have you been, Basille? You look so tired.'
'Just walking around. I'm all right.' She spread her couch of stiff and stinking animal hides. 'We'd better turn in, eh?'
But she slept little.
6
The highway curved between great looming walls of cragged old rock, a shadow tunnel with the wind yowling far overhead and the sun a disc of blood. Women's footfalls echoed from the cracked paving blocks to boom hollowly off time-gnawed cliffs and ring faintly in the ice. It was cold, their breath smoked from them and they shivered and cursed and stamped their feet.
Donovan walked beside Hal, who was riding Wocha. Her eyes narrowed against the searching wind, looking ahead and around, looking for the side track where the ambush waited. Drogobych was very near.
Something moved up on the ridge, a flapping black thing which was instantly lost to sight. The Arzunians were watching.
There--up ahead--the solitary tree they had spoken of, growing out between age-crumbled fragments of the road. The highway swung west around a pinnacle of rock, but here there was a branch road running straight south into a narrow ravine. All I have to do is suggest we take it. They won't know till too late that it leads up a blind canyon.
Hal leaned over toward her, so that the long wind-whipped hair blew against her cheek. 'Which way should we go?' he asked. One hand rested on her shoulder.
She didn't slacken her stride, but her voice was low under the whine of bitter air: 'To the right, Hal, and on the double. The Arzunians are waiting up the other road, but Drogobych is just beyond that crag.'
'Basille! How do you know--'
Wocha's long hairy ears cocked attentively, and the little eyes under the heavy bone ridges were suddenly sharp on her mistress.
'They wanted me to mislead you. I didn't say anything before for fear they'd be listening, somehow.'
Because I hadn't decided, she thought grayly. Because Valdum is mad, and I love him.
Hal turned and lifted his arm, voice ringing out to rattle in jeering echoes: 'Column right! Forward--charge!'
Wocha broke into a trot, the ground booming and shivering under her huge feet. Donovan paced beside, drawing her sword and swinging it nake
d in one hand, her eyes turned to the canyon and the rocks above it. The humans fell into a jogging run.
They swept past the ambush road, and suddenly Valdum was on the ridge above them, tall and slim and beautiful, the hair like a blowing flame under his helmet. 'Basille!' he screamed. 'Basille, you triple traitor--'
The others were there with him, women of Drogobych standing on the heights and howling their fury. They had chains in their hands, and suddenly the air was thick with flying links.
One of them smashed against Donovan and curled itself snake-like around her waist. She dropped her sword and tugged at the cold iron, feeling the breath strained out of her, cursing with the pain of it. Wocha reached down a hand and peeled the chain off, snapping it in two and hurling it back at the Arzunians. It whipped in the air, lashing itself across her face, and she bellowed.
The women of Sol were weltering in a fight with the flying chains, beating them off, stamping the writhing lengths underfoot, yelling as the things cracked against their heads. 'Forward!' cried Hal. 'Charge--get out of here--forward, Empire!'
A chain whistled viciously for his face. He struck at it with his sword, tangling it on the blade, metal clashing on metal. Takahashi had her blaster out, its few remaining charges thundering to fuse the missiles. Other flames roared at the Arzunians, driving them back, forcing them to drop control of the chains to defend their lives.
'Run! Forward!'
The column shouted and plunged down the highway. Valdum was suddenly before them, his face distorted