“No, no bullets,” Oleg agreed. He took back the rifle, then touched part of it above and to one side of the trigger. Fralk had not realized it was a separate piece, but the front end of it, the end toward the muzzle, moved. “This is the change lever,” Oleg said.

“Change lever,” Fralk repeated dutifully.

“Da. When the front of the change lever is here, at the top, you cannot pull the trigger. Always carry the rifle with the change lever like that, so it does not shoot by accident.”

“At the top,” Fralk echoed. The idea of a rifle that could shoot by accident tempted him to turn blue again. A spear or an ax did what it did because some male made it work. If no one was around, it would just lie there. The rifle sounded as though it had a mind of its own. Fralk wondered if he could trust it away from its human masters.

Oleg did not give him time to dwell on that. He moved the change lever. “With it here, in the center position, the rifle will shoot many bullets, one after the other.” He moved it again. “With it here, at the bottom, the rifle will shoot one bullet at a time.”

“Why the choice?” Fralk asked.

“If enemy is close, you use up fewer bullets and save them for other foes.”

“Oh,” Fralk said. That made sense, of a sort. So many things to think about…

The wind howled out of the south, blowing the snow it carried along almost horizontally. Reatur stood in the middle of his field with all his arms happily stretched out. “A spell of decent weather at last,” he said. “I was sick of all that heat.”

“All what heat?” the human beside him muttered. Louise was bundled in even more false skins than humans usually wore; she-Reatur hardly had to remind himself of that anymore, something he could not have imagined a few eighteens of days ago-even had a coveting for her eyes, transparent as ice but harder to melt.

The domain master gestured expansively. “We often get a few stretches of nice southerly breeze,” he said. “I’m particularly glad to have this one, because it will help keep the castle walls solid.”

“’Nice southerly breeze,’ “Louise echoed. Then she sighed, a sound that, when human mates made it, was eerily like the one people used in the same situation. “Glad cold good for something.”

“It’s not cold,” Reatur protested, only to have Louise sigh again. One thing about which people and humans would never agree was what constituted good weather.

“Never mind,” Louise said-she realized that, too. “Much ice melting at edge of land where all ice-makes storms come, blow even here.”

Reatur started to answer but stopped. Not for the first time, one of the ideas a human casually tossed out made him look at the world in a different way. It had never occurred to him that what happened in one place could affect weather somewhere else.

“Is the weather across Ervis Gorge the same as it is here?” he asked after a moment’s thought. “Not much different. Why?”

“The one bad thing about snow is that it makes things far away harder to see. If it’s snowing on the Skarmer side of the gorge, they made decide to hit us now because the males I have watching won’t know they’re coming till too late.”

Louise’s wrappings made trying to read her expression, always a tricky business with humans, a waste of time now. But when she said, “One more thing to worry about,” Reatur’s eyestalks could not help twitching. No matter how strange they looked, in some ways humans thought very much like domain masters.

As if thinking about humans had conjured up more of them, three came into sight trudging along the new path that led from the castle to their flying house. Or perhaps, Reatur thought on seeing Irv, Pat, and Sarah together, it was Louise’s mention of one more thing to worry about that made them appear when they did.

The newcomers had their heads down. They were talking among themselves in their own language. They all jerked in surprise when Reatur called, “Any luck?”

They turned toward him. He saw how splattered with eloc’s blood they were; the wind brought its sharp scent to him, budding and death intermingled in the odor. With that smell so thick, he hardly needed to hear Sarah’s glum reply. “Not much.”

“Some,” Pat corrected. “Budding far along when we get to eloc’s pen. Not have much time to get ready. Do better next try.”

The humans had been saying that since Sarah’s first go at saving an eloc mate. They had yet to keep one alive, Reatur thought gloomily. As if picking his thought from the air like a snowflake, Sarah said, “Not enough luck, not yet. If eloc was Lamra, Lamra dead now.”

“How much longer till Lamra buds?” Irv asked. By dint of endless work, he was starting to speak the Omalo language quite well.

After a moment’s thought, Reatur answered, “An eighteen of days, an eighteen and a half at the outside.” When the humans first put forth the idea of saving Lamra, he had been of two minds about wishing them success. Now, though hope of that success looked as far away as ever, he knew how downcast he would be if they failed. That made no sense to him, but he was getting used to common sense collapsing whenever humans touched it.

What Pat touched was the goresplashed front of her false skins. “Go get clean,” she said to Reatur, and started to walk on toward the flying house. Then she added, “Wish I had hot water,” which left him almost as confused as when he had realized how his feelings about Lamra’s survival had changed.

One of water’s few virtues, to Reatur’s way of thinking, was being better for washing than ice or snow. But hot water?. Hot water was a weapon of war, good for shooting at a foe from a distance or undermining the thick hard ice of his walls. Did Pat mean she was going to wash herself in it? The domain master knew humans loved heat, but that was taking things altogether too far.

He never thought to wonder how Pat felt about his living in a castle made mostly of ice.

The boats bumped down the path toward Jotun Canyon. The path, meant only for occasional travelers, was not nearly wide enough to accommodate so much traffic. Minervans and their beasts of burden slogged eastward, using the roadway more as a sign of the direction in which they should go than as a means of travel in itself.

Oleg Lopatin marched along with them. He was whistling cheerfully, something which, had they heard it, would have filled the rest of the crew of Tsiolkovsky with disbelief. But, he thought, he had every reason to be happy.

For one thing, he was doing conspicuously less than the warriors all around him. True, his AKT4 was slung over his shoulder and he had a heavy pack on his back, but he was not hauling boats on ropes like the Minervans. Nothing satisfies the soul like watching others work harder than oneself.

For another, he was doing, actually doing, something every Soviet officer dreamed of and planned for. He was marching to war against the Americans, in a place where they had no nuclear weapons to make life difficult. So, he whistled.

Fralk turned an eyestalk toward him. “How do you make that peculiar noise, Oleg Borisovich?” the Minervan asked in good Russian.

“You just pucker your lips and-“ Lopatin began in the same language. Then he remembered who-and what-he was talking to. “Never mind,” he said lamely, switching to the Skarmer tongue. “Your mouth, mine not same.”

Fralk sighed. “No, I suppose not.” Even so, a minute or so later he sent air hissing up and out through his mouth. It did not sound like whistling; it sounded like a steam valve with a leak, Lopatin thought. The sight of Fralk’s breath smoking out would have completed the illusion, but Fralk’s breath did not smoke. It was too cold.

The KGB man found another reason to be glad he was marching-he stayed warmer this way.

He passed Minervans practicing their paddling on boats set down by the side of the road. They were none too efficient at best; when they turned three or four eyestalks-and their concentration-on the human instead of their job, they grew positively ragged. Unlike Lopatin, they would not freeze in moments if their coracles flipped them into the icy water now rushing through Jotun Canyon. Also unlike him, though, none of them could swim a stroke.