“Why the big light?” he asked.

Sarah tried to explain; Reatur gave credit where it was due.

But he did not understand the explanation. For one thing, Sarah did not have enough words. For another, the domain master suspected that some of the ideas were as strange as humans. As best he could gather, the picture-making thing needed a lot of light to see by. He supposed that made sense.

Sarah put the picture-maker into one of the pockets of the coverings humans wore. Reatur had only gradually realized those were coverings, not part of the humans’ skins.

From a different pocket, Sarah drew out something else. Reatur heard a click. Light streamed out of the thing, not in a single blinding flash but steadily and at a lower, more comfortable level. “Flashlight,” Sarah said. Reatur tried to remember the word; his language had no equivalent for it.

Sarah shone the light at Reatur’s feet, courteously keeping it out of his eyes. The light splashed over Biyal’s body. “The budding female?” Sarah asked.

“Well, of course,” Reatur said gruffly-humans had a gift for asking about the obvious.

“At the budding female I close look?”

It took several tries, backed by a good deal of gesturing, before Reatur figured out what Sarah meant. The domain master hesitated. He had cleared the chamber in the mates’ quarters by himself after Biyal died-he did not want other males to have anything to do with his mates, or even to venture into that part of the castle. But he had not kept the humans out of the mates’ quarters. They were too odd to worry about their planting buds on his mates. And poor Biyal would never bud again, that was certain.

“Look if you care to,” the domain master said at last. “Yes,” he added a moment later. Humans needed things kept simple.

He started back toward the castle. One of his eyes watched Sarah bend over Biyal’s corpse. That peculiarly human motion still struck him as grotesque. Humans could not widen, though. He was sure of that. They did the best they could with the weird bodies they had.

As did everyone else, he thought. That reminded him of the watch he was still posting on Ervis Gorge. Nothing whatever had happened there since Fralk-on whose eyestalks the domain master wished the purple rash-was urged to go back to his own side and stay there. Reatur wondered whether he was wasting his males’ time by keeping them at the gorge. He decided to leave them in place a while longer. Up against a rogue like Fralk, fewest chances were best.

The male dropped the lamp at Fralk’s feet; in fact, he almost dropped it on one of Fralk’s feet. “What’s all this about, Mountenc?” Fralk asked. He was both surprised and a little angry. As eldest of eldest, he was not often exposed to such rude behavior.

But Mountenc was angry, too. “This stinking thing didn’t even live as long as a mate, Fralk,” he snapped. “It doesn’t light up anymore, and I want my eighteen stone blades back for it.”

“I never said how long it would last, Mountenc,” Fralk pointed out.

“Four nights isn’t long enough,” the other male retorted. “I kept it on all through the dark so I could see to work, and now look.” He picked it up and used a fingerclaw to click the little switch that made the light come out. No light came. “It’s dead,” Mountenc said contemptuously, “and I want my blades back.”

“First let me see if I can make it live again,” Fralk said. He did not have the blades anymore. He had traded them for something else. At the moment, he could not remember what, but he had turned a profit.

From the way Mountenc was glaring at him with three eyes at once, he did not think the other male would care about that. “You’d better,” Mountenc said.

“I will do what I can.” Fralk was pleased to notice that none of his concern showed in his voice. He was a good deal less pleased when he remembered how many little lamps he had sold. If they all started dying, he was liable to end up dead himself.

By the time Fralk was done talking Mountenc around, though, the other male was halfway polite again. Of course, had someone given him the promises he had made Mountenc, he would have been happy, too. He wondered if he could make those promises good. Time to find out, he thought as he carried the defunct lamp over to the humans’ tent.

Next to the tent stood the thing-Fralk thought of it as a landboat-the humans used to travel about. It rolled on the round contraptions humans seemed to prefer to skids. Thinking about the flying boat that had almost fallen on him, Fralk reflected that humans not only seemed to like traveling, but also seemed very good at it.

That only made him wonder again why nobody had ever seen any of them before. Maybe they really did Come from the Twinstar.

As the humans liked, he paused beside the tent and did not go straight in. “Hello!” he called, and then added the human word: “Zdrast’ye!” Nothing happened. He hailed again. Still nothing. He said something unhappy, not quite out loud. Sometimes the humans went wandering through Hogram’s town on foot. He hoped they had not chosen today to do that. Today he really needed them.

He hailed again. Finally the entrance to the tent opened. Fralk was so relieved that he hardly minded the hot air that came blasting through the doorway. The human who looked out was still adjusting the outer skins he and his kind wore. “Brrr!” the human said, a word whose exact meaning eluded Fralk.

A moment later, another human appeared beside the first. This one was also playing with his outer skins and taking too long to do it for Fralk’s taste. Having only two arms made humans clumsy, he thought with a touch of scorn.

“Fralk, yes?” the second human said. He was the only male with a voice like a person’s, which made him easier for Fralk to name. He still found humans hard to tell apart by sight.

“Da, Katerina Fyodorovna.” Fralk said the name carefully; he still stumbled when he used human speech. He had learned, though, that the second part of each human’s name was a memory of his father. There, amid so much strangeness, was a something that made perfect sense. Back to the business in his claws, Fralk thought. He asked, “Is Valery Aleksandrovich here?” Of all the humans, he could speak with that one best.

The male Katerina moved his head back and forth, which Fralk thought weird but had come to learn meant no. “Shota, me here,” Katerina said. “Valery, Sergei-“ The human groped for a word. “Gone.”

“Gone looking, make pictures,” Shota said.

“Da,” Fralk said, to show he understood. The humans were as curious about Hogram’s domain as Fralk was about them.

Shota said something in his own language, too fast and complex for Fralk to follow. He made Fralk more nervous than any other human. Maybe it was a holdover from their first wary meeting, when Fralk had feared the human’s picture-making device was a weapon. Or maybe it was that Shota made the alarming yip Fralk had decided was human laughter more often than any of the others.

He was yipping now, as he reached out to touch Katerina in the area below the front of the other male’s head, between the arms. Katerina knocked his hand away; the smaller male’s face, always pink, turned a deeper shade of red. Humans’ colors did not mean nearly so much as his own folk’s, but the change, accompanied as it was by a hostile-looking gesture, made Fralk wonder if Katerina and Shota were about to fight.

But Shota said something else that made both humans yip. Katerina turned his head back toward Fralk, as Fralk might have turned a polite eyestalk on someone with whom he was talking. “You, ah, want what?” the human asked.

Fralk held up the lamp that had failed Mountenc. He clicked the little fingerclaw sticking up out of it that was supposed to make it light, then clicked it over and over, back and forth. “No light,” he said. “Dead. Can you fix it, make it light again?”